At 11:47 PM on Thursday night, Asad Mehmood had been standing in line at a Lahore petrol station for 58 minutes. His motorcycle was nearly empty. The queue stretched two blocks. Everyone was shouting.
"I heard the price was going up at midnight," the 34-year-old delivery rider told a local television crew. "If I don't fill up now, I can't work tomorrow. But I've been waiting an hour and there's still 30 bikes ahead of me."
At midnight, Pakistan's fuel prices jumped by Rs 55 per liter — from Rs 266 to Rs 321 — the largest single increase in over a year. The government initially blamed Middle East supply disruptions, then admitted the truth: the International Monetary Fund demanded it.
According to ARY News reporting, the IMF explicitly told Islamabad to "pass on any increase in petroleum product prices to consumers without delay" to protect Pakistan's petroleum development levy target of Rs 1.468 trillion by June 30.
The human cost of that fiscal mathematics played out in chaos across Pakistan's cities. In Karachi, fights broke out at multiple fuel stations as queues overwhelmed staff. In Islamabad, police were called to three stations to manage crowds. In Peshawar, some stations simply closed rather than face the mob.
Pakistan collected Rs 822 billion in petroleum levies from July to December — already exceeding 60 percent of its annual target. But the IMF's $7 billion bailout program requires Pakistan to hit specific revenue benchmarks. When global oil prices don't cooperate, Pakistani consumers pay the difference.
"This is the squeeze," explained economist Dr. Hafsa Malik in Karachi. "Pakistan is caught between IMF conditionality and Middle East geopolitics. Both are completely beyond Islamabad's control. And 240 million Pakistanis are caught in the middle."
