The students being taken to court on Friday. Picture by Biplab Basak

Siliguri, May 9: Three students of Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College were arrested last night for teasing and creating nuisance. All three were picked up from a restaurant at DBC Road in Jalpaiguri.

Debnarayan Chakraborty of mechanical engineering, accompanied by Arnab Sadhu and Atanu Shit of civil engineering, had entered the restaurant around 9.30pm.

“They appeared drunk as they walked to a table on the first floor of the restaurant. Soon, they started making lewd remarks at a girl sitting at a nearby table. When a youth protested, the students hurled a stream of expletives,” said a police official.

The would-be-techies were then asked by the owner of the restaurant to vacate the place. They went out but came back again in a few minutes. This time, they refused to leave. The shouts and screams resulting from an altercation that followed prompted the local people to intervene. They asked the three fourth-year students to leave.

The trio refused and instead accosted a local youth, demanding money from him. The residents then called the police from the Kotwali station, a stone’s throw from the restaurant.

Tapas Das, the additional superintendent of police, Jalpaiguri, said all three were booked for “teasing, behaving indecently with women and creating nuisance in a public place in a drunken state”. They have been granted bail.

Debnarayan was expelled from the college hostel last month after he, and three of his classmates, asked for matchbox from a teacher to light cigarettes on the Bengali New Year’s Day.

When the teacher refused saying they could buy it from a shop, the students had retorted that if a shop had remained open, they would not have taken the trouble of asking “a teacher” for matches. The faculty had gone on a strike then to protest against the indecent behaviour of a section of students.

Although the police today claimed that the college authorities were informed about the arrest last night, principal J. Jhampati pleaded ignorance.

“I have no such information and need to check it out,” said Jhampati before switching off his cellphone. Representatives of the students’ association could not be reached as their phones, too, were switched off.

The students, while being taken to the chief judicial magistrate’s court from the police station this morning, said whatever happened last night should have been avoidable.

“It is a shame that senior students and prospective engineers, who are likely to join reputed companies in the future, are engaging in this sort of behaviour,” said a senior teacher of the college.

On December 13 last year, seven third-year students of the college were arrested for ransacking a bar-cum-restaurant in Jalpaiguri town and beating up the staff.

The employees had alleged that they were assaulted for asking the students to pay up the Rs 1,240 that they owed on the early visits to the hotel. The students were later released on bail.

Representatives of the students’ union had then said the bar employees had first attacked the group of seven, while the principal had washed his hands off by saying it was not possible for him to monitor so many students.