New Delhi, November 14: A statue of Swami Vivekananda, installed at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, was vandalised by unknown miscreants on Thursday. The statue of Swami Vivekananda was yet to be unveiled. Pictures of the vandalised statue showed miscreants also wrote abusive words for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). "Saffron will burn," read one of the derogatory message written by vandals.

The National Students' Union of India, Congress party's student wing, condemned the incident and cleaned "Saffron will burn" and other derogatory things written on the floor where Swami Vivekananda's is erected. "I don't think any student of JNU could have done this. Now, we have cleaned it," NSUI leader Sunny Dhiman told news agency ANI.

The JNU has been in news due to ongoing protests by students over a hike in hostel fee. As protests intensified, the JNU administration on Wednesday scaled down the hike in hostel charges and other proposed decisions, describing it as a "major rollback". Following the decrease announced by HRD Secretary R Subrahmanyam, single room occupancy will now be Rs 200 and for a double room, it will be Rs 100.

Earlier, the charges were hiked from Rs 20 to Rs 600 for single room occupancy and from Rs 10 to Rs 300 for double room occupancy. The varsity also restored the one-time mess security deposit to Rs 5,500 from the proposed Rs 12,000, officials in the ministry said. However, the service charge of Rs 1700 will continue, as will the utility charges, which will be the actuals.

In May, a bust of the 18th-century Bengali social reformer Iswarchandra Vidyasagar was vandalised inside a Kolkata college, causing the political temperature to soar across the state. Over a month after the incident, red ink was thrown at a statue of Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in West Bengal's East Bardhaman district. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar Statue Vandalism: Mamata Banerjee Appoints Home Secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay and 5-Member Committee to Probe Incident.

In March 2018, a five-foot-tall statue of Lenin was demolished with a payloader at Belonia in South Tripura allegedly by a group of BJP workers after the saffron party won the state assembly elections there, toppling the left government.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Nov 14, 2019 03:18 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).