Lalji Desai, Congress Seva Dal national chief organiser and Rutwik Makwana, Gujarat Congress working president, along with three others, have been booked for allegedly protesting against a government school in Surendranagar whose students wore T-shirts featuring photographs of Veer Savarkar and Chandrashekhar Azad during a Tiranga Yatra on Wednesday.
The five were also booked in the FIR registered at Chotila police station in the district for allegedly disrupting the Yatra and preventing the principal and teachers of Sangani village’s primary school from performing their duties.
The complaint, lodged by school principal Kalpesh Chauhan, alleged that the Congress leaders intervened around 11 a.m., forcing students and teachers to stop their march when the Tiranga Yatra and the Congress leaders’ Gujarat Nyaya Yatra crossed paths.
According to the police, the Congress leaders recorded videos of the students in saffron-coloured T-shirts and circulated them on social media. According to Chauhan, Desai told them that it was “unfair to ask the students to wear T-shirts with photos of RSS leader Veer Savakar.”
Desai allegedly said to the principal, “Don’t you feel ashamed to ask students to wear T-shirts of the very Veer Savarkar who was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi? Will you ask students to wear T-shirts of Nathuram Godse or some Rangabilla Dawood if I were to give you them tomorrow? Don’t demean independence by asking them to put on Veer Savarkar T-shirts.”
The Congress march encountered the Tiranga Yatra while party leaders were marching towards Sayla from Chotila town. Chauhan’s complaint states that some Congress leaders asked the students to remove their T-shirts. The principal explained that the T-shirts, representing freedom fighters Savarkar and Azad, were gifted by the Indumati Vasantalal Charitable Trust, Mumbai.
“Laljibhai knows it well that such utterances can insult various sections of the society and freedom fighters,” Chauhan stated.
The five individuals have been booked under multiple sections of the Bharatiya Nayaya Sanhita(BNS), including promoting enmity between communities, publishing false information, wrongful restraint, unlawful assembly, obstructing public servants and intentional insult with intent to provoke a breach of peace.
The Congress party’s Nyaya Yatra began on August 9 in Morbi, aiming to seek justice for victims of recent tragedies, including the Morbi bridge collapse, the TRP Game Zone fire in Rajkot, the Harni boat tragedy in Vadodara and the Takshashila complex fire in Surat. The Yatra is set to conclude in Gandhinagar on August 23, after travelling through several districts, including Rajkot, Surendranagar and Ahmedabad.
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