Rahul takes dig at BJP's Beti Bachao Beti Padhao drive

New Delhi: Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Sunday slammed the BJP over the police lathicharge on girl students of the Benaras Hindu University in the party- ruled Uttar Pradesh, saying it was their version of "Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao".

A number of students, including women, and two journalists were injured in the baton charge in the university which witnessed violence last night, in an ugly turn to a protest against an alleged eve-teasing incident.

Attaching a link to a video of the students who alleged that they were beaten up by male policemen at the campus, Gandhi tweeted "BJP version of Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao in BHU." The trigger for the protest was an incident in which a woman student of the Arts faculty alleged harassment by three men on a motorcycle inside the campus while she was returning to her hostel.

The three men abused her and fled when she resisted their attempts, according to the complainant. The woman alleged that security guards, about 100 metres from where the incident happened, did nothing to stop the men.

She said her warden, instead of taking up the issue with her superiors, asked her why was she was returning late to the hostel.

The warden's response angered fellow students, who sat on a 'dharna' at the main gate midnight Thursday. One of the students even got her head tonsured.

BHU students have alleged they have to face eve-teasers on the campus regularly and the varsity administration was not taking any action to stop the miscreants.

Earlier in the day, Gandhi thanked External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for recognising Congress' "legacy" of IITs in her speech at the UN General Assembly on Saturday.

"Sushma ji, thank you for finally recognising Congress governments' great vision and legacy of setting up IITs and IIMs," he said.

New Delhi: Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Sunday thanked External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for finally "recognising" his party's vision of setting up IITs and IIMs in the country. He was referring to Swaraj's hard-hitting speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday, where she gave the examples of these premier institutes as India's achievements and said Pakistan, in contrast, had "produced terrorists".

Rahul on Sunday tweeted, "Sushma ji, thank you for finally recognising Congress governments' great vision and legacy of setting up IITs and IIMs."

Referring to Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi's speech at the UNGA where he accused India of violating human rights and state-sponsored terrorism, Swaraj said "We established scientific and technical institutions which are the pride of the world. But what has Pakistan offered to the world and indeed to its own people apart from terrorism?"

The first IIM was established in Calcutta in 1961 by the Jawaharlal Nehru government, on the recommendation of the Planning Commission. There are 20 IIMs in the country.

IIT Kharagpur, the first of the 23 such institutes, was formally inaugurated in 1951. During its first convocation in 1956, then prime minister Nehru had said it was a "fine monument of India, representing India's urges, India's future in the making."