Members abandon TLP after leadership booked on terrorism charges

Scores of officials and workers of the ultra-right Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) in the provinces of Sindh and Punjab have dissociated themselves from the party and its leadership after the registration of sedition and terrorism cases against its chief Khadim Hussain Rizvi and his deputy Pir Afzal Qadri.

The government announced on Saturday it had booked both leaders for inciting violence against the army and judiciary in fiery speeches last month.

“I, along with a large number of workers, have quit the party,” Imtiaz Alam, a former TLP leader in the Tharparkar district of Sindh, told Arab News on Monday.

“There is no reason left to stand with the party and our leaders after they called for mutiny in the armed forces,” he said. “We were struggling for a just cause and cannot even think of saying something against our state institutions.”

Alam claimed that hundreds of TLP workers in Sindh had silently quit the party after Qadri called for mutiny in the army and urged the domestic help of Supreme Court judges to kill them for acquitting a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, in a blasphemy case.

“We were supporting the party when it was talking about protection of blasphemy laws in the country, but now they have gotten off track,” he added.

The fiery, wheelchair-bound cleric Rizvi and his deputy Qadri were supported by hundreds of their followers, who blocked the roads connecting Pakistan’s major cities after the Supreme Court announced the decision to acquit Bibi on Oct. 31.

Both the leaders have been in “protective custody” since Nov. 24.

Azmat Malik, an active supporter of the TLP in Chakwal district of Punjab, said that he had also decided to quit the party after the outburst of Rizvi and Qadri against state institutions.