Jat body threatens to disrupt Commonwealth Games

Nearly 5,000 members of the Jat community, under the banner of Akhil Bhartiya Jat Sangharsh Samiti, gathered at the Rally Ground in Sector 25 for its national executive committee meeting on Thursday.

While deciding on the future course of action, members threatened to disrupt the Commonwealth Games to be hosted in Delhi in October this year if Jats were not included in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category.

Senior leaders said the community which had been left out of the OBC category in some states and also at the Centre, deserved to get reservation.

In what they called the 'Chandigarh Declaration', members of the executive committee decided to take on the government if their demand was not heeded to. People had come from states like Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh among others.

Speaking on the occasion, national president of the Samiti, Yashpal Malik, said they were being forced to resort to aggression after the one-month period, which they had given to the government, expired on March 10.

"We are recognised as a peasantry class and the Mandal Commission had mentioned Jats in the OBC category. Some states including UP, Delhi, Uttarakhand, HP, MP, Bihar and Gujarat have all included Jats in the OBC category, but states like Haryana, Punjab and J-K have still not done so," Malik told mediapersons.

"In order to create a wave of support, we will hold a Jat Reservation Rath Yatra starting from the Golden Temple in Amritsar and then march through various states. We held an assembly in Delhi on February 8 and had given an ultimatum of a month to the government to look into our demand. But this seems to have been ignored. We have, therefore, assembled here to decide the future course of action," he stated.

Directing criticism towards the members of Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) workers, who are sitting on hunger strike near the rally ground, leaders of the Jat community held the party responsible for the delay in grant of quota in Haryana.

The rally passed off peacefully and the memorandum of demands was received by representatives of the Punjab and Haryana governments.