ISLAMABAD, April 17: A dejected Lashkari Raisani on Tuesday finally resigned from Senate and also ended his nine-year-long association with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) over, what he called, failure of the federal and provincial governments to improve security situation in Balochistan.

Talking to a group of reporters after submitting his resignation to the Senate Secretariat, Mr Raisani said he had taken the extreme step after getting disappointed with the PPP leadership’s attitude towards the grievances of the people of Balochistan, where his elder brother Aslam Raisani is the chief minister.

“When no one is listening to me, then I think there is no place for me in the PPP,” he said.

Answering a question, Mr Raisani said he had so far not decided about his future plans.

Sources in the PPP told Dawn that Mr Raisani had been in contact with both the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) and Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf (PTI) and was expected to formally join any of the two parties in the next few days.

Lashkari Raisani, who was appointed as president of the PPP Balochistan chapter by former party chairperson Benazir Bhutto in 2003, alleged that the situation had gone from bad to worse in his province since the PPP acquired power at the Centre and in the province after the 2008 general election. He had also been raising voice against corruption in the Balochistan government.

Due to his public criticism of the party leadership, President Asif Ali Zardari met him twice in the recent past but failed to persuade him to withdraw his decision to quit the PPP.

Mr Raisani, who had resigned as the provincial head of the party in 2009 following a rift within the party ranks in Balochistan, had brought embarrassment to the party leadership when he refused to take Pakistan Day award from President Zardari in protest against the poor law and order situation in Balochistan in 2010.

Declining the award which the government had announced for all the members of the Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reforms that had drafted the historic 18th Constitution Amendment, Mr Raisani had cited two reasons — one that the committee members had not performed any extraordinary job and only performed their duty as legislators and two that Balochistan situation was so serious that it did not look nice to receive medals when people were being killed there.

“The (secret) agencies people are roaming freely in my province. People are being killed daily and mutilated bodies are found in my province. So how can I receive the award even if it is announced by the government of my own party? My conscience did not allow me to do so,” he had told Dawn at that time.

In his recent TV talk shows, he had been openly criticising the country’s intelligence agencies for allegedly picking up the people in Balochistan and saying that the PPP government had no moral authority to rule the province.

He was also not happy with the pace of implementation of the Aghaz Haqooq-i-Balochistan package and had repeatedly asked the federal government to take immediate steps for its implementation.