On the warpath!
George Iype in New Delhi
The simmering discontent over pay disparities in the Indian Air Force has spilled over to the streets with a section of the uniformed men and their families mobbing senior IAF officers across the country.
A group of IAF personnel and their families at its Kutch base in Rajasthan went on a day-long strike yesterday, when the Air Marshal Janakiraman Committee refused to look into their grievances.
The IAF men also attacked two senior police officers, smashed their vehicles and held up the civilian traffic on the Bhuj-Khavda border road for more than six hours in protest against the hefty salary hike to IAF's fighter pilots.
The Committee members have been visiting the air bases across the country to study the grievances of the technical personnel comprising engineers, system maintenance staff and airmen. The staff has been up in arms, demanding parity with pilots who have received 'massive salary hikes' recently.
IAF sources said some of the top officers in the engineering wings would quit if the defence ministry fails to remove the pay anomaly.
One such officer, Air Vice Marshal Mritunjoy Singh, the senior maintenance staff officer of the Eastern Command, has resigned in protest against the disparities in the salaries of flying and technical personnel.
But an IAF spokesperson told Rediff On The Net that Singh took premature retirement from the Force after he was reprimanded for using intemperate language against a senior officer.
While the air headquarters at New Delhi is engaged in a major exercise to control its agitating engineering staff, a senior technical IAF officer said the technical and engineering divisions have lost faith in the Janakiraman Committee.
"We do not think the Committee will solve our problems as it has been mooted by Air Chief Marshal S K Sareen," he told Rediff On The Net.
While the new pay structure provides the technical staff a monthly allowance ranging from Rs 226 to Rs 750, their counterparts in the flying wing get Rs 7,000 or Rs 9,000, depending on whether they fly transport or fighter planes, say the technical staff.
Stating that the fighter pilots would be grounded if they do not have the ground staff's support, the technical staff blame Air Chief Marshal Sareen's lopsided policies for the crisis.
The air headquarters and the defence ministry have justified the higher flying allowance on the basis of the risks involved.
But the technical staff feels the justification is absurd, considering that the flying staff would be handicapped without the ground staff.
Sources said the turmoil in the IAF will be resolved only if Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral steps in.
While the prime minister has not yet taken any initiative in this regard, defence officials say the current crisis will trigger a drastic overhaul of IAF's policies.
They say the turmoil could have been avoided if the government had launched an insurance cover for fighter pilots instead of giving them hefty hikes.
"In many foreign countries, unlike in India, the fighter pilots are insured... The government has to take some practical steps to ensure that the country's air wing remains a disciplined force,"
a defence official said.
But with the general elections round the corner, it is unlikely that the caretaker Gujral government will take any major policy initiative to resolve the smouldering crisis.
EARLIER REPORT:
IAF tries hard to curb discontent in its ranks
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