How to make Spring MVC controller work with UTF-8?

I am using jQuery AJAX to submit a form to a Spring MVC controller in the backed. I am setting encoding on top of the jsp. In my request headers in Firebug I see -

Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive          115
Connection          keep-alive
Content-Type    application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
X-Requested-With    XMLHttpRequest

However in my Spring MVC controller all the form values entered in Cyrillic turn into junk. And a twist to this is that this works fine in Safari but not in IE/FF/Chrome.

Any thoughts as to how I can set the correct encoding and prevent junk chars from getting submitted?