Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Saturday alleged that the thrashing of a child in a school in Uttar Pradesh was the result of the Bharatiya Janata Party's hate-filled politics.  

   

He said such incidents tarnish the country's image and call for strict punishment to the guilty so that no one dares to repeat them.  

A video showing a school teacher in Muzaffarnagar asking her students to slap a Muslim boy and making objectionable remarks against his community has gone viral on social media eliciting strong words from several political parties.

"The manner in which a teacher made other children thrash a child in a school in UP due to religious discrimination is a disturbing result of the hate-filled politics of the BJP-RSS. Such incidents tarnish our global image. This is against the constitution," Kharge said on X in a post in Hindi.  

He termed the incident a result of the "divisive thinking of the ruling party" and cited another incident where an RPF jawan gunned down four people "in the name of religion."

A Railway Protection Force (RPF) jawan had on July 31 shot dead four people on board a train near Palghar railway station in Maharashtra. 

The jawan had fired from his automatic weapon, killing another RPF jawan and three passengers of the train, which was on its way to Mumbai from Jaipur. -- PTI