Several ABVP activists were briefly detained on Sunday after they staged a protest outside the PDP office here against the recent remarks of its president Mehbooba Mufti and allegedly threw paint at a billboard with her picture on it, officials said. Over half-a-dozen ABVP activists, carrying national flags, appeared outside the heavily guarded Peoples” Democratic Party (PDP) office at Gandhi Nagar and broke the police cordon to throw green paint on Mufti”s picture on the billboard near the entrance of the office, they said. They said the slogan-shouting protesters made repeated attempts to enter the building and hoist the tricolour but were initially stopped by police personnel who took several of them into preventive custody briefly. However, later some of them were allowed by policemen to hoist the national flag at the iron fence. The former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister on Friday had said that she was not interested in contesting elections or holding the tricolour till the constitutional changes enforced on August 5 last year were rolled back. Mufti said she would hold the tricolour only when the separate flag of the erstwhile state was restored.
