Around 300 former special police officers of Assam on Monday threatened to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge in Guwahati, into the Brahmaputra river, unless they were given permanent jobs, which they claimed the government had promised them.
Special police officers are tasked with guarding government officials and development projects. The state administration had discharged these officers in 2015, which had led to violent protests. They have been demanding regularisation of their jobs or absorption into the Assam Industrial Security Force.
In Guwahati on Monday, scores of men who had been employed as special police officers, many of them dressed in uniform, blocked the Saraighat Bridge over the Brahmaputra for several hours and halted traffic by lying down in front of vehicles. They also broke police barricades in an attempt to jump off the bridge, UNI news agency reported.
The police and paramilitary forces were called in to restore order, The New Indian Express reported. “We are giving a deadline of May 5 to the state government,” a leader of the men said. “The chief minister will have to meet us and settle the issue by then. If not, we will carry out the mass suicide anywhere in Guwahati.”
“We have no job, no money to look after our families,” said another former officer, according to The Hindu. “The government does not want us to live, and by preventing us from jumping into the river, it does not want us to die either.”
An unidentified official in Home Commissioner LS Changsan’s office said the special police officers were recruited in 2008 on the condition that these would be temporary jobs. “There is no point demanding regularisation of job when they had agreed to the condition in the first place,” he told The Hindu.
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