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| Omar Abdullah is ready to talk to separatists not to govt employees | | | Early Times Report
Jammu, Aug 17: It was a good and timely gesture when the Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah once again invited the Kashmiri separatist leaders for talks. Omar said there was no alternative to dialogue and all problems can be resolved through engagement alone.
Omar Abdullah would have done definitely better had he implemented his own words and started talking to the state government employees whose genuine demands are being ignored because the Chief Minister is still in no mood to listen to them.
It is also wrong in principle that the Chief Minister can speak with the separatist leaders, but not to employees of his own government. One wonders whether the decision to invite the separatist leaders to dialogue for the nth time was prompted because the central government asked the Chief Minister to dangle the olive branch before them or because the state government wanted to ease its law and order tensions by throwing a line of communication open to the separatists.
The workforce of the state government is its employees. It is because of the hard work put in by these employees that the wheels of governance are moving in the state despite being badly rusted. If the state government cannot engage its own employees in a dialogue process how can we convince the separatists or for that matter the ordinary people that the intentions of the government to speak with them are honest and genuine?
The state government employees have already announced their agitation programme being after the Eid festival. The agitational path has been a bitter decision for the state government employees. They had to resort to it after all their imploring and appeals fell on deaf ears. Nobody among the ministers appears to be in a mood to speak to them or at least to those of the government employees who are working under their immediate control by virtue of the portfolios they hold. This is because the Chief Minister has been showing no inclination to engage the government employees in a sustained dialogue which would be result oriented.
The general impression being conveyed by the government has been that the state government employees are making demands those cannot be agreed because of the financial constraints faced by the state.
The state government employees are no outsiders to the affairs and realities of the state. They know better than many ministers what actually ails the state. They cannot be so unrealistic as to ask the government something which they know is practically impossible.
The fact that must be clearly understood in this context is that the state government employees are only asking the government to implement its own decisions. The payment of arrears as per the recommendations of the 6th Pay Commission has already been agreed to by the government. The employees are only asking that the arrears be released in their favour. The second demand is the enhancement in the retirement age from the existing 58 to 60 as is applicable to the employees of the central government.
This is not a demand the employees are adamant on not discussing with the government. The problem is that the government has been maintaining that acceptance of this demand would only result in increased unemployment. The government employees are ready to discuss this demand and also ready to convince the government about the merits of their demand or be convinced by the government about its demerits, but somebody should call them up for a sustained dialogue on this point.
The third demand is to regularize the services of daily wagers in various state government departments. The tragedy is that the state government has already through a legislation decided to regularize the daily wagers and ad hoc employees. Despite over one year after its decision to regularize daily wagers and adhoc employees not a single person from among daily wagers has been regularized so far.
The striking employees are only asking the government to implement its own decision with respect to the regularization of daily wagers in the state.
The problem is not of the demands being reasonable or unreasonable. The problem is that the Chief Minister is ready to speak with the separatist leaders who demand nothing short of state's secession from the country, but he is not ready to speak with his government's workforce. Perhaps because their demands are not anti-national as those of the separatists. |
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