A newly wed couple was beaten up by Punjab University’s Islami Jamiat Talaba (IJT) for standing together to ‘promote obscenity’ on Wednesday, and the vice chancellor refused to take action. The religious activists beat up the husband and dragged him on the road to their main office near the university’s Habib Bank, and called the wife a prostitute. The Jamaat-e-Islami youth wing activists did not pay attention to the couple’s statement that they had come to meet their sisters. Although the university claims it has stopped all political activities on campus, the IJT is thriving and has wide and violent influence in most of the departments and offices. Sources and eyewitnesses told Daily Times on Thursday, that when the IJT was about to begin a protest rally on Wednesday, Hamid and his wife had come to the university from Kasur to meet their sisters who studied in the Philosophy Department. They were standing outside the department waiting for the girls’ class to end when some Jamiat activists led by the Geology Department’s IJT leader named Gondal, abused the couple, dragged Hamid to the IJT office and beat him up, misbehaved with his wife, and held them hostage.
When their sisters arrived and found out what had happened, they rushed to the IJT office and asked the religious activists to free the couple. When they refused, the sisters went to the deparmentÂ’s chairman Naeem Ahmed for help. He sent them to the vice chancellor. The vice chancellor refused to take action and told them to go back to the chairman. The chairman came back to his office and formed a three-member committee to investigate the issue. The committee took one day to compile its report in which it said the incident took place but it was not authorised to take action against the IJT students because they belonged to three different departments, and the case should be referred to the universityÂ’s disciplinary committee.
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