KARACHI: Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain withdrew his decision to quit the party leadership on Sunday at the insistence of his followers.

On Saturday night, he had told a private TV channel that he was quitting the party leadership and transferring his powers to the MQM coordination committee.

But he also criticised the committee for its “feudal attitude” and “ignoring his ad­­vices” and said that some elements in the party were pleased when he was arrested in London.

As soon as the news of his decision to quit the party leadership was aired by TV channels, a large number of workers of the party reached Muttahida’s Nine Zero headquarters and said that they wanted to speak to Mr Hussain to persuade him to withdraw his decision.

Members of the committee and other office-bearers of the party stayed at the nearby MQM secretariat and told reporters that the committee, the party’s elected representatives and other office-bearers also had quit their posts to persuade Mr Hussain to renounce his decision.

After about two hours, Mr Hussain started addressing his followers on phone. The activists, women and elderly men among them, made an emotional appeal to him to review his decision.

They asked him to bring back the old guard and remove the current office-bearers when he asked them whether he should send the committee members packing or retain them.

But it was clear that Mr Hussain did not want to dissolve the committee or even name and remove those who, according to him, had expressed joy over his arrest.

He gave a ‘last chance’ to the committee and asked the party’s cadre to send from each sector of the party’s organisational structure three names of educated and responsible workers who were not involved in any illegal activities, including “China cutting, land grabbing and extortion”.

“When we have clean, hard-working and honest members then we would relieve the negligent members of the committee,” he said. He said the Mohajirs were still not considered ‘sons of the soil’. “If the Sindhi people cannot accept an Urdu-speaking chief minister, then the province should be divided on administrative grounds.”

He said it was unfair to try former president Gen Pervez Musharraf on treason charges and spare others, including the judges of the Supreme Court, who had aided and supported his 1999 coup.

He also said that had MQM workers entered Islamabad’s red zone, they would have been “greeted with bullets”.

Published in Dawn, September 15th, 2014