Withstanding the public fury over the establishment of Toll plazas one after the other in the Jammu region, a strong contingent of Panther activists led by Harsh Dev Singh Chairman JKNPP and Yashpaul Kundal State President Young Panthers staged a protest in Jammu here on Thursday.

While setting ablaze the effigy of BJP and raising anti-government slogans, the enraged protesters sought the abolition of Lakhanpur Toll Plaza besides others in the interest of the people.

Lambasting the BJP government for installing Lakhanpur Toll Plaza on the gateway of J&K and keeping in the pipeline the construction of two more plazas, one at Phallian Mandal on the Ring road and another on Akhnoor road, Harsh said that the move was fraught with dangerous portends.

He said that people of Jammu were wary of even the existing Toll Plazas at Ban and Sarore which were taxing them heavily in addition to another one at Nashri.
�The people were up in arms against the government seeking to disband of these Toll Plazas.

With BJP leadership cheating them by false assurances amid revival and establishment of Lakhanpur Toll Plaza had turned the civil unrest from bad to worse with massive public outrage�, Harsh rued.

Describing the establishment of Lakhanpur Toll Plaza and other installations as points of forced extortion of taxes from the people, he said that with the plan to install 6 Toll Plazas in the vicinity of Jammu, the huge taxation in the form of multiple Toll Plazas was simply unaffordable for the common masses and particularly those who had to commute on regular basis between Jammu, Akhnoor, Katra, Udhampur, Samba, and Lakhanpur.

He accused the GoI of doling discrimination to the Jammu region in view of only one such Toll Plaza functional in Kashmir while the Dogras were put under the burden of road tax to fill up its coffers.

Yash Paul Kundal warned the J&K government about the writing on the wall that the City of Temples was being converted into city of Toll Plazas.

He said that civil society and others had also expressed their concern over the issue which had the potential to explode in a big way.

He said that the situation in J&K was already very sensitive and the govt. the move of installing Toll Plazas would have the effect of adding fuel to fire.

Calling upon the Lt. Governor to review the installation of the Toll Plazas in the Jammu region, he cautioned that such moves could dangerously trigger catastrophic public revolt beyond control.

Prominent among those who spoke on the occasion included Rajesh Padgotra, Gagan Pratap Singh, Naresh Chib, Ravinder Singh Jamwal, Rakesh Gupta, Yash Paul Sharma, Khajur Singh, Hakim Din, Ved Raj Sharma, Gurprem Angrual besides others.