Southern States - Tamil Nadu   

SC to hear reinstatement plea tomorrow

By J. Venkatesan

NEW DELHI July 29. The Supreme Court will hear on Thursday an application from the DMK MP, C. Kuppusami, for a direction to the Tamil Nadu Government that it take back 31,128 employees, who were refused reinstatement on July 25.

A Bench comprising Justice M. B. Shah and Justice A. R. Lakshmanan decided to hear the matter after T. R. Andhyarujina, senior counsel for the petitioner, `mentioned' for consideration the application along with the final orders to be passed on July 31 on a batch of petitions questioning the dismissal of the employees for participation in a recent strike.

He brought to the notice of the Bench that after the July 24 order, over 31,000 employees were turned away on the ground that first information reports were lodged against them. Citing an instance, he said nearly 250 persons were included in one FIR with a mention of the name first, and the rest were given as `others'.

In his petition, Mr. Kuppusami said that at the Chennai Secretariat alone nearly 3,850 employees, belonging to different categories, who did not attend office on July 2, were included in the list of employees against whom FIRs had been lodged.

He gave a break-up of figures for employees who were refused reinstatement: officials of the Collectorate and revenue, treasury and registrar offices-11,000; Secretariat-3,850; aided college teachers-7,000; government college teachers-4,800; panchayat union school teachers- 2,000; aided school, high and higher secondary school teachers-1,400; corporation school teachers-178 and staff in the office of the Director of Public Instruction-800.

Nalini Chidambaram, senior advocate, told The Hindu that she would file affidavits on ``anomalies'' in lodging FIRs and reinstatement.

She said the Chief Secretary issued instructions for deletion of the names of persons from the FIRs on some grounds and consequently a number of employees were reinstated. She said the Government had not taken note of the fact that an FIR could not be tampered with ``except as per the procedure established by the law.''

Ms. Chidambaram alleged that as the names of all persons targeted by the Government were not found in the FIRs, attempts were being made to include/delete the names of its choice in the FIRs. Also, common FIRs had been filed for a large number of employees.

Further it was seen from the FIRs that in most of the departments, all employees were charged under Section 4 (participation in strike) and Section 5 (inciting strike) of the Tamil Nadu Essential Services Maintenance Act.

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