New Delhi, Sept. 11: A day after Bajrang Dal activists vandalised Lucknow’s Loreto Convent, politicians were treading with caution.

The Congress, which attacked the BJP for “trying to politicise the issue”, kept its distance from the missionary school lest anyone point a finger at party president Sonia Gandhi’s Catholic roots.

The BJP, still counting the political losses of the Ujjain campus scandal — where a professor died after being punched by members of its student wing — said the Bajrang violence was “unnecessary”.

Parents, meanwhile, worried about the “scars” left on the students’ minds by television pictures of yesterday’s vandalism.

The Bajrang activists had accused the 140-year-old school of trying to convert students by holding an occult show on Wednesday where the spirit of Jesus was allegedly invoked.

“No educational institution, minority or majority, should mislead students, encourage meaningless rituals which have no connection with education,” Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi told reporters.

Almost echoing him, BJP leader V.K. Malhotra said: “Any school, whether Hindu, Muslim or Christian, should focus on modern scientific teaching. In today’s day and age, no educational institution should be spreading superstitions.”

But he quickly added: “It would have been much better if they (the Bajrang activists) had spoken to the school authorities instead of indulging in vandalism.”

A parting barb at the “Christian institution” though, proved irresistible. “Had any Hindu school indulged in such an activity, there would have been a huge furore,” Malhotra said.

Loreto is looking for support from the Mulayam Singh Yadav government. After all, the daughter of Akhilesh Yadav, Mulayam’s son and Samajwadi Party MP, is a nursery student at the school.