QUETTA, May 16: Police arrested over 200 farmers here on Monday after foiling their bid to stage a demonstration outside the Balochistan Assembly in protest against power loadshedding which is destroying crops and fruit orchards watered by tube-wells. On a call of the Balochistan Zamindar Action Committee, several hundred farmers and peasants had gathered in the lawns of City District Government secretariat in the morning.

Soon after the beginning of a session of the provincial assembly, they began moving towards the assembly building but a heavy contingent of police blocked their way and prevented them from coming out of the premises of the secretariat. Senior officials of the district administration and police told leaders of the protesters that they could not take out a procession or stage a demonstration since section 144 had been imposed in the city.

The protesters refused to abandon their protest programme and insisted on taking out a procession to the assembly. Police took a number of farmers into custody and sent them to a police station for detention. Later in the afternoon, police freed them but they staged a sit-in inside the police station and refused to leave the premises.

“All those taken into custody are free to go home,” an officer of the Saddar police station told this correspondent. The chairman of the Balochistan Zamindar Action Committee, Syed Taj Mohammad Agha deplored that police had arrested 250 farmers for seeking to register their protest in a peaceful way.

He said that the protest would continue till an end to the loadshedding and alleged that the Quetta Electricity Supply Company was committing atrocities against farmers who had already suffered eight-year long drought.

However, a spokesman of Qesco denied the allegation and claimed that the loadshedding programme had been implemented for three days for replacing around 30 towers of high transmission lines blew up by saboteurs in different areas.

He said that that the farmers were defaulters of millions of rupees as they had not paid electricity bills since long and added that Qesco was facing a financial crisis due to non-payment of dues by agricultural and commercial consumers in the province.