KHYBER: Despite police pressure, Fata Loya Jirga (FLJ) continued with its anti-merger signature campaign as a legal requirement to convince the Supreme Court of Pakistan on arranging a hearing of its petition against the merger of former Fat a with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

FLJ chairman Haji Bismillah Khan told Dawn that the campaign was conceived and started on the advice of their Islamabad-based lawyer, Khwaja Haris, who asked them to provide written proof that a majority of tribesmen were opposed to the 2018 merger plan.

He said the signature campaign was started in all the seven merged districts to fulfill the legal requirement for acceptance of their plea against the merger.

He said they were aiming to acquire maximum number of signatures of the tribesmen supportive of their contention.

The FLJ chief, however, regretted that police in Jamrud, Landi Kotal and Bara thwarted their efforts to establish camps for acquiring the signatures of residents in these areas.

He said that police even asked tent service providers not to rent tents to the FLJ activists, and additional police force was deployed at the sites which they had selected for establishing camps in Bara and Jamrud a day ahead. `In Landi Kotal the police prevented us from obtaining signatures from local residents on Saturday.

Bismillah Khan, however, insisted that the signature campaign would continue despite coercive tactics by the Khyber police, and they have started distributing proformas for anti-merger signatures in private houses, market places, mosques, educational institutions and hujras across the merged districts.

The proforma required every signatory to declare that the merger of erstwhile Fata under the 25th Constitutional Amendment was done against the wishes and aspirations of tribal people and that they rejected it and demanded the region be returned to the previous constitutional status.