JAIPUR: St Xavier’s School authorities here on Wednesday suspended seven Class XII students for 20 days for allegedly offering puja to Lord Ganesha in their classroom on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi. The report about students’ suspension spread like wildfire, providing Saffron parties an opportunity to take on the missionary school management, which ultimately assumed a communal colour.

After receiving frantic calls from parents about the suspensions, more than 200 members of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) — the youth wing of BJP — reached the school and started throwing stones at the school and broke some windows. Police later detained six BJYM supporters.

St Xavier’s is one of the oldest schools in Jaipur. It was set up in 1941, and has produced some of the brightest students in all of Rajasthan.

“We kept on pleading with the school Father that he needed to take mild action as the students hadn’t done anything unethical,” said Shankar Agarwal, father of Tanmay, one of the suspended students.

He said that he reached school after receiving a call from the authorities who told him that St Xavier’s “was a school, and not a temple”. He said that a few students had put up a poster of Lord Ganesha in the classroom and offered puja.

“We requested that students shouldn’t be punished so severely. But when the authorities did not budge, we were forced to call political parties,” he said.

Principal Fr Jose Jacob, however, said he suspended seven students of class XII-B of the commerce section for breaching school discipline. He said during recess about seven students of the class were caught enacting a “mock puja of Ganesha with a poster pasted on the black board”.

He said what was going on was some kind of mockery as the whole class was laughing loudly. He said he went to the class after hearing the noise. After that, the seven students were sent back to their homes and their parents were informed.

Around 6.30 pm, some Yuva Morcha activists barged into the campus and began to break windowpanes and chucked some flower pots on the campus. They shouted slogans against the principal of the school and went away once the police reached the spot.

Fr Jacob said, “We respect all religions. However, we cannot tolerate indiscipline. First of all, a classroom is not the place for pujas and, above all, these students were performing a mock puja”. He said it is very unfortunate that the disciplinary action initiated against these students have taken communal overtones.

BJYM city president, Nidhi Shekhar, however, said the district administration should arrest the school principal for restraining someone from performing puja.