Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Feb 23: A large number of Government employees from various departments and Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) today staged protest demonstration near Press Club in support of their demands.
The employees and workers under the banner of Govt Employees Joint Action Committee (GEJAC), assembled near Exhibition Ground, adjoining Press Club Jammu in the morning and then held demonstration. A strong contingent of police force was already deployed there to stall their march towards Civil Secretariat. They were shouting slogans in support of their demands and also against the Government attitude.
Several leaders of the Employees Joint Action Committee including Suresh Sharma, Sushil Sudan, Subash Verma, Aijaz Khan, Shabir Lingu, Ishtiaq Beg, Gh Hassan Malik, Suman Sharma, Bashir Mir and Mohd Farooq addressed the gathering. They strongly criticized the Government for causing delay in releasing of 6th Pay Commission arrears of the workers, removal of pay anomalies, regularization of daily rated/ consolidated workers and implementation of Pay Commission recommendations in PSUs fully.
They pointed out that Government has failed to honour its commitment. They said that employees will give 15 days time to the Government and if it failed to honour its commitment, the employees will be forced to start agitation. This symbolic protest must be considered as a warning signal, they maintained.
Later, the employees tried to march towards the Civil Secretariat in the form of a rally but they were not allowed beyond Dogra Chowk by cops. The workers showed some resistance but they were cane charged and forced to confine to the specific area selected for protest.

Khurshid, while campaigning for his wife Louise, a Congress candidate from Farrukhabad in UP, had promised the electorate last month that the party would increase the sub-quota for minorities to 9%, out of the 27% Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation.

AHMEDABAD: A magisterial court on Thursday issued notices to Supreme Court-appointed SIT after social activists Teesta Setalvad and Mukul Sinha filed two separate applications seeking the copies of the SIT report filed in the Zakia Jafri case.

The court of metropolitan magistrate M S Bhatt issued notices to the SIT and posted the hearing to Feb 13.

The SIT on Wednesday filed a closure report in the sealed cover on the complaint of Jafri, wife of ex-Congress MP Eshan Jaffery.

Jafri in her complaint had sought prosecution of Modi, along with 57 others, for aiding and abetting communal riots.

Ehsan Jafri was among the 69 persons killed in the Gulberg Housing society riots. Around 1,200 people were killed in the communal riots.

On September 12 last year, the Supreme Court had refused to pass any order on Modi’s alleged inaction in containing riots in 2002 and left it to the concerned magistrate’s court to decide the course of action against him on the basis of the SIT report.

In the petition, Zakia had alleged that Modi and 62 top government officials deliberately refused to take action to contain the state-wide riots, triggered by the February 27, 2002 Godhra train carnage.

The SC had further said that in case the magistrate decides to drop proceedings against Modi and others, he has to hear the plea of Zakia, who had filed a complaint against the chief minister and others.

Jafri had told the apex court that a proper probe should be carried out by the SIT, headed by former CBI chief R K Raghavan, into her allegations of inaction and various acts of omission and commission by Modi and others during the riots.

The apex court in 2009 had earlier handed over the task of probing the case to SIT which submitted its report in 2011.

BJP leader Arun Jaitley today said if the final report of the SIT probing the 2002 post-Godhra riots in Gujarat gave a clean chit to CM Narendra Modi then the case should be closed, as it has been investigated thrice in the past.