THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson and president of the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, Tushar Gandhi, has urged the state government to withdraw the FIRs and charge sheets filed against students who protested in solidarity with the Delhi protest.
In his letter to Chief Minister V D Satheesan and Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala, Tushar Gandhi said he was “unpleasantly surprised” that Kerala Police had booked protesting students.
“This does not behoove the progressive state of Kerala, and even more so, a government led by the Congress party,” he said in the letter.
He noted that Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi had backed the students’ movement. They had condemned the “brutal oppression” unleashed by the Union government and the Delhi Police. Action against students in Kerala, where the UDF government is in power, was “disgraceful,” he said.
“Let me not remind you that the Congress was born out of the spirit of satyagraha; one expects much better from a Congress-led government, invoking the Congress party’s roots in the Satyagraha movement,” he said in the letter. Tushar Gandhi appealed to Satheesan and Chennithala, whom he described as personal friends, to follow the Congress high command’s line.