LAHORE, Nov 19: PML-N leaders at a protest meeting here on Wednesday resolved to continue their struggle till party’s acting president Javed Hashmi was set free.

Punjab PPP president Qasim Zia and MMA leader Liaquat Baloch added their voice to the demand and announced that a decisive movement against the rulers would be launched after Eid.

The meeting was held outside Lohari Gate. Slogans against the rulers and in favour of the detained PML-N leaders were raised in chorus.

Provincial PML-N president Zulfikar Khosa said his party would throw the generals out of power on a call from the leadership. He said his party was not opposed to the army as an institution, but was against the military oligarchies.

Deputy opposition leader in the Punjab Assembly Rana Sanaullah demanded formation of a commission to determine whether it were politicians or the military rulers who were bringing a bad name to the army. If the disease was not diagnosed immediately, the country might have to face more sufferings, he warned.

He said India had exalted the scientist who made it a nuclear power to the office of the president. But in Pakistan, he regretted, the prime minister who brought nuclear technology was hanged and the one who made it an atomic power was banished.

Qasim Zia said the fight against the rulers would continue till former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were back home.

He said military rulers who always argued that they were in power because of a Supreme Court judgment should heed the latest verdict as well that no government employee could take part in politics.

MMA leader Liaquat Baloch said Javed Hashmi’s release from jail and Gen Musharraf’s ouster from power would take place simultaneously. He said time had come that it should be decided for good whether the right to rule the country lay with the people’s representatives or the army.

Referring to complaints that the opposition lawmakers had wasted one year in desk thumping because of which no legislative business could be carried out, Baloch said in fact what was apparently desk thumping was opposition’s resolve to crush dictatorship.

He said the Punjab had established to other provinces that it was opposed to dictatorship.

MNA Maimoona Hashmi, the daughter of the detained leader, said time was not far when opposition parties would throw out the present rulers.

MNA Saad Rafiq criticized the military rulers and alleged that all decisions about Pakistan were being taken in the US.