Jaipur, Sept. 27: A nearly hundred-strong group of students in Udaipur today hurled stones at a technical college after an engineering student from Kashmir wrote anti-India comments, shared posters of slain militant Burhan Wani on his Facebook page and raised pro-Pakistan slogans in the open.
It was not clear what had provoked Muddasar Rasheed, a third-year student of the private Techno India NJR Institute of Technology in Udaipur, 394km from the Rajasthan capital.
Some sources said the civil engineering student may have first shared the posters of Wani, the Hizb commander whose death at the hands of security forces this July triggered the ongoing unrest in the Valley, and then responded to comments the posters had prompted.
This morning's protest came days after Rasheed, described as a good student by his college director, raised the anti-India and pro-Pakistan slogans on Saturday.
A group of local students under the banner of the Chhatra Sangharsh Samiti were joined by those from the ABVP and the NSUI, the student wings of the RSS and the Congress, and students from other colleges and universities as they raised slogans and hurled stones at the institute.
The group, numbering nearly a hundred, said any anti-India stand would not be tolerated. The protesting students also met the college authorities and police.
"We wanted to protest and let the college administration know that these incidents cannot continue," student leader Dilip Joshi, former president of the Mohan Lal Sukhadia University student union, said. "There was no vandalism but we raised slogans and pelted stones."
Today's incident was the latest involving a campus row since the JNU controversy broke out in February this year after a student group commemorated Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.
Techno India NJR director R.S. Vyas claimed that some college property had been damaged. "We called the police who are investigating the matter. We have already suspended Rasheed for seven days," Vyas said, adding the third-year civil engineering student was a "good student who gets above 70 per cent every year".
Vyas said the college, started eight years ago, admitted around 15 good students from orphanages in Kashmir every year and provided them free education, food and lodging to help them integrate with the mainstream.
Fearing further backlash, the college administration has taken the other Kashmiri students - five of them girls - to a safer place.
Vyas said it was not possible to keep track of Facebook posts of all students and added the college would decide what action to take against Rasheed depending on the police investigations. The college has around 700 students on its rolls.
A year ago, around 1,200 students from Jammu and Kashmir were asked to vacate Pacific University in Udaipur after an altercation snowballed into a clash with local students.
In March this year four Kashmiri students were taken into preventive custody following allegations that they had cooked beef and got into a brawl with local students in Chittorgarh's Mewar University. They were subsequently let off.