Vijayan Seeks Trains for 1,500 LPU Students

Pinarayi Vijayan on 28 September asked Delhi and Kerala to get more than 1,500 Malayali students home from Lovely Professional University, which has shut classes for 10 days. The Leader of the Opposition said the Union and State governments should move them from Jalandhar to Delhi and then to Kerala, and should ask the Railways for special trains or extra coaches if tickets run out.

By then the campus in Phagwara was already emptying. Police said students had been walking out with bags since the night of 27 September, after a protest over an alleged sexual assault turned into arson, a highway blockade, and a lathi charge.

The Campus Emptied After a 15-Hour Highway Blockade

Lovely Professional University sits on the Jalandhar-Phagwara stretch of NH-44 and enrols more than 35,000 students from India and abroad. The unrest began near Girls Hostel-3 about 1 am on Sunday, 27 September, after students said a plumber, described as an outsider, had sexually assaulted a woman in the hostel three days earlier and that the warden had sat on the complaint.

Some of the same messages also tied the allegation to a suicide. Police have not established that link. The university called the circulating claims false, baseless and fabricated rumours, Registrar Monica Gulati said, and blamed “anti-social elements” for spreading them.

Talks with Vice Chancellor Jaspal Singh Sandhu did not end the sit-in. Students had said they would leave once police registered a case. They then wanted Ashok Kumar Mittal, the founder chancellor and Rajya Sabha MP, to come to the gate himself. He did not. The crowd moved onto the Delhi-Amritsar highway about 4 am.

HOW SUNDAY UNFOLDED AT LPU

1. 23 September 2026: The complaint later given to police alleges a rape in a girls’ hostel on this date.
2. 27 September, about 1 am: Students gather near Girls Hostel-3 and move toward the main gate, asking for a probe, tighter hostel security, and a promise they will not be punished for protesting.
3. Early Sunday: Window panes, flower pots, furniture, motorcycles and shops in the campus mall are smashed. Objects are set on fire, including ambulances. A student climbs a decommissioned MiG-23UM on the grounds. Others climb a decommissioned tank at the gate.
4. About 4 am: Protesters block NH-44. The blockade lasts more than 15 hours before traffic moves again.
5. Sunday into Monday: Police register a rape case against an unknown person, form an SIT, and use a lathi charge after stones hit their vehicles. Two police vehicles are burned. Several officers are injured. The university suspends regular classes for 10 days from 28 September and postpones midterms.

SP (Investigation) Harinder Gill said the campus had been peaceful since Sunday night and that students had been leaving from then. Police stayed on the gates.

The FIR Names No One

Punjab Police registered the case under Section 64 punishment for rape of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which sets a floor of ten years’ rigorous imprisonment. The file names no suspect. DIG Jalandhar Range Naveen Singla said the SIT would use forensics, CCTV and phone data, and that student representatives would sit on the team.

The SIT is headed by SP (Phagwara) Major Singh and includes a deputy superintendent, a woman inspector, and student members. Sandhu said the university would hand over every camera file the police asked for. “So far, no such incident has come to my notice,” he said.

Senior officers who checked the hostel room named by protesters said they could not back the allegation there. “The three girls present in the hostel room where the sexual assault is alleged to have occurred denied that any such incident took place,” one officer said. The university also put out a video of three women from Room 504 saying they had lived in that room for two months and that no such incident had happened.

ADGP (Intelligence) Praveen Sinha said the alleged victim had not been identified and that students had not given police a name. Singla said police were separately examining the death of another LPU woman student from Telangana, who died about 15 days earlier in a suspected suicide; her phone was seized for forensic tests.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The case: Police have an FIR against an unidentified person and an SIT that includes students.
• The shutdown: Regular classes are off for 10 days from 28 September, and midterms are postponed until further notice.
• The road: NH-44 was blocked for more than 15 hours, then reopened under a heavy police watch.
• The exit: The university told students they may go home after talking to parents, and police said the leaving had already begun.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The victim: Police say they still do not have a name for the woman in the assault complaint.
• The suicide claim: Messages tying this hostel case to a death have not been independently established.
• The plumber: No named worker has been arrested on the rape charge.
• Who burned what: Police say a scientific probe of the arson is on, and that people who took the law into their own hands will not be spared.

The gap between those two lists is what filled the weekend. A rape complaint is a police matter. An unnamed complaint, plus a suicide rumour, plus a 10-day freeze, is what sent thousands of out-of-state students toward the station at once.

What Kerala Students Say Happened in Hostel 3

Liano Daniel, a second-year aerospace engineering student from Kochi, said the first she heard was not a date or a name. Other students arrived two nights earlier saying a girl had been raped on campus and that they had to protest. The version in student groups, she said, was that a hostel plumber entered a room, that the management hid it and forced the student home, and that the student later tried to kill herself, or died. She said she still did not know who the student was.

She described a campus of more than 500 acres with hard rules for women and almost none for men. Girls must be inside the hostel before 8 pm. Boys have no such curfew. Even a father, she said, is not allowed to see a daughter alone in a room, and women carry their own luggage out. The mess staff, electricians and plumbers are men. “They say it is for our safety. There is no safety here,” she said.

If someone dies by suicide, an ambulance comes within five minutes. They take the person, they clean the place, and other students never hear what happened. The college does not even hold two minutes of silence.

Liano Daniel, second-year aerospace engineering student from Kochi

She said some rooms in Hostel 3, on a lower floor or the fifth floor, had been locked off, and that a warden had been recorded saying staff did not go with the plumber, which hostel rules require when work is done in a woman’s room. Jithin Jose, a second-year mechanical electronics student from Kollam, was arrested in the protest and released on the afternoon of 28 September. Liano said she was hit on the head and that other Malayali students were hurt.

That is the texture behind Vijayan’s number. It is also still one student’s account, set against a police file with no name and a university video from Room 504. Both can be read in the same week without forcing a verdict the SIT has not reached.

Ashok Mittal Is the Chancellor Students Could Not Reach

Mittal is a BJP Rajya Sabha MP who left the Aam Aadmi Party in April. Students asked him to come to the protest and promise there would be no revenge through the University Management System, the portal that controls campus life. They also wanted an apology from the pro-vice chancellor, stronger security in women’s hostels, no male staff posted where women live, action if hostel officials were negligent, and, for some, the warden’s resignation.

Vijayan went further. He said Mittal and the management “attempted to suppress the protest by deploying the police and Sangh Parivar goons,” and he called for a full inquiry into the management’s role. The CPI(M) state secretariat, in a separate note, said outsiders linked to the management had attacked protesters and that students were being pushed out of hostels.

BJP leader Ravneet Singh Bittu pointed the other way. He accused the AAP government in Punjab of sending miscreants onto the campus ahead of Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s rally in Jalandhar on 30 September, and of trying to shut LPU after Mittal left AAP. Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann ordered strict action against those behind the violence and sent DGP Gaurav Yadav to the campus. Yadav said even senior people would not be shielded, and he asked the public to ignore rumours.

The argument on the public internet followed that split. One track treated the rape-and-suicide version as already proved and the lathi charge as the scandal. The other track treated the burning of campus property as the story and the assault claim as a rumour. Neither track waited for a name on the FIR. The party fight over Mittal’s defection and a rally two days away is louder than the ticket queue, and it does not move a student from Phagwara to Ernakulam.

Why More Than 1,500 Malayali Students Need Trains

Vijayan put the Malayali enrolment at more than 1,500 and said their safety and travel were now as urgent as the probe. He asked the Centre and the Kerala government to handle the Jalandhar-to-Delhi leg and the onward journey, and to work with the Railways on special trains or extra coaches “given the potential for ticket shortages.” Parents’ fears, he said, had to be answered at once.

Congress leader K.C. Venugopal said Malayali students at the university had called him after the clashes and that arrangements had already been made to help them return. Those two statements can sit together. Permission to leave is not the same as a berth on a train that runs the length of the country on short notice.

The university, in its own notice, told students they may travel to their hometowns during the 10-day break after consulting parents or guardians. Anyone who stayed was told to remain inside hostels or residences, skip extra movement, and stay out of “unrest activities.” That notice turned a police night into a mass checkout. LPU has long drawn a Kerala students at the university cohort large enough that Kerala politicians treat a Phagwara hostel scare as a home-state problem.

WHAT THE TRAVEL ASK NOW INCLUDES

• The route: Jalandhar to Delhi, then Delhi to Kerala, which Vijayan said the Union and State governments should organise together.
• The tickets: Special trains or extra coaches if the ordinary quota cannot absorb a sudden exit.
• The stay-backs: Hostels only, no movement through a campus that still has police on the gates.
• The parallel calls: Venugopal says return help is already being arranged; Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary spoke to Mittal on 28 September about students from his state.

Kerala has run this corridor before. In May 2025, during the India-Pakistan border scare, a special train was sanctioned from Delhi to Kerala for Malayali students coming out of Jammu, Srinagar, Baramulla, Punjab, Jalandhar and Chandigarh. That operation is not this one. It is the template parents are already calling about.

Punjab Put 2,000 Police on the Gates

ADGP M.F. Farooqui said a force of over 2,000 personnel was on the campus through the night and that families of women in the hostels should not panic. Jalandhar Police Commissioner Satinder Singh said reports of trouble inside hostels were rumours, that every hostel had been checked, and that all students were safe. Mobile internet was suspended on the campus and in nearby areas from midnight.

The same night sat barely a day after a separate protest at Chitkara University in Patiala, about 140 km away, where students had acted on unverified claims of screams from a hostel. Police said they saw no link. The Punjab State Women Commission later took suo motu notice of both campuses and asked for the FIRs and for a note on student safety.

THE 28 SEPTEMBER SNAPSHOT

• Force on site: Over 2,000 police personnel, with extra units called from nearby districts.
• Road closed: More than 15 hours on NH-44 before traffic resumed.
• Calendar frozen: 10 days without regular classes from 28 September, midterms postponed.
• Kerala cohort: More than 1,500 Malayali students, per Vijayan, now in a homebound scramble.

Yadav, after a short visit, said police had shown restraint and that forensic work on the vandalism would go on. The academic penalty and the criminal file are now on different clocks. One is a 10-day gap. The other has no named victim and no named accused.

Midterm Exams Are Off Until Further Notice

The university’s notice was blunt. “Regular classes will remain suspended for a period of 10 days with effect from 28th Sept. 2026 (Monday). Mid-Term Examinations are postponed until further notice. The revised examination schedule will be communicated separately via UMS.” Safety, it said, was the reason.

That portal is the same UMS students feared would be used against them. Their list of demands treated access to it as a protection issue, not an IT issue. A 10-day freeze with exams in the air means anyone who goes home is betting the new timetable will not punish the people who left.

WHO SAID WHAT ON 28 SEPTEMBER

The sexual offences under the new code are written for a proved assault, not for a weekend of rumours. Section 64 still needs a complainant the police can find. Until that happens, the live pressure on Delhi, Thiruvananthapuram and the Railways is the one Vijayan named: berths for a Kerala cohort that has just been told to go home from Punjab with 10 days of classes wiped out.

Gill said the leaving started on Sunday night. The new exam dates, the university said, will arrive later on the campus portal.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a campus unrest and a live police investigation. It is informational only and is not legal advice, medical advice, or a finding on whether a sexual assault occurred. Readers who need advice about a criminal complaint, campus safety, or a student’s travel should consult a qualified lawyer, university official, or the relevant police and railway authorities before acting. Figures, case statuses and travel plans reflect the public statements available on 28 September 2026 and may change as the SIT and the university update their records.