A day after Rahul Gandhi said that St Stephen’s College in the Capital did not encourage its students to ask questions in classrooms, the college, its teachers, students and alumni questioned the veracity of the comment.

Most students — both present and former — and teachers said on Wednesday that Stephen’s has had a history of prodding its pupils to be involved in classroom by asking more questions.

The comment led the usually quiet Vijay Tankha, a faculty in the Department of Philosophy and Dean (Academics), to take a dig at the AICC general secretary. He said the Amethi MP might have asked too many questions in the wrong class. “A history class is quite crowded, so he may have been asked to bring his questions to the tutorial or talk to the teacher after class instead of asking them during the lecture.

“We should probably check to see how many tutorials he attended in his brief stint in college.”

Rahul was a student of History at St Stephen’s College for less than a year.

Adnan Nayeem Azmi, a student and president of the college student’s union, said, “I have never been stopped from asking questions.” But Adnan, and a few other teachers, added that the Lok Sabha MP’s personal views “could have their own validity”.

Mani Shankar Aiyar, Union minister and a St Stephen’s alumnus, said he graduated from the college in 1961 and then spent the next three years, till 1963, at Cambridge University. For him, the years at St Stephen’s were “far more intellectually stimulating than Cambridge — this is not just because of the teachers but also due to my peers”.

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