HYDERABAD: Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) activists, including women, held a protest rally outside the local press club on Tuesday against Federal Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali’s statement condemning their party chief Altaf Hussain’s remarks a day earlier against Rangers officials and security institutions.

The protesters raised slogans against the interior minister as well as Defence Minister Khwaja Asif, who also gave a statement against Mr Hussain.

Carrying banners and party flags, they condemned what they called “conspiracies” against the MQM and its chief, registration of cases against Mr Hussain and security forces’ operation targeted against the MQM alone.

Speaking to them, MNA Waseem Hussain claimed that a deep-rooted conspiracy was being hatched to eliminate the MQM.

He said lives of MQM activists and supporters had been made miserable on political grounds through arrests and torture in custody.

“Either recognise us [as equal citizens] or poison us to death,” he said addressing the law enforcement agencies, asserting that the ideology of Altaf Hussain could not be dissolved.

“Corrupt [Pakistan Peoples Party co-chairman] Asif Ali Zardari recently hurled a strong warning at the army but without any response from his target,” he said while criticising the strong reaction shown by the law enforcement agencies to Mr Hussain’s latest statements. The MNA also criticised PPP’s role viz-a-viz the ongoing Karachi operation.

MPAs Dilawar Qureshi, Zubair Ahmed and Rashid Khilji and other MQM activists also spoke and reminded the federal and military leadership that 50 million Mohajirs could not be pushed to the wall.

The placards held by some of the protesters warned Chaudhry Nisar to stop hatching conspiracies against the MQM.

The speakers also slammed “propaganda” against MQM by some TV anchorpersons without naming them.

They observed that neither the two ministers nor the anchorpersons took seriously the slogans of ‘Sindhu Desh’ and ‘Azad Balochistan’ by separatists who even torched the national flags.

They said the MQM would withstand the tough time it was facing these days like it did in 1992.

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2015

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