Junior doctors waiting to meet Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, who was visiting their college, were allegedly bundled into police jeep and detained for four hours on Sunday in Jhansi.

A video that has been widely shared on social media shows the police kicking and shoving some of the junior doctors.

Dr Hardeep Jogi, president of the Resident Doctors’ Association of Maharani Laxmi Bai Medical College, Jhansi, said ministers kept visiting the medical college but did not address their problems.

“This was the reason that we wanted to meet the chief minister. But his police attacked and detained us.”

Denying that the doctors were manhandled, Andra Vamsi, district magistrate of Jhansi, told reporters: “We had stopped the doctors to maintain peace during the chief minister’s programme. We received their memorandum and promised to sort things out.”

The doctors had no earlier plans of meeting the chief minister, Vamsi said. The action was taken so that there was no disruption in the chief minister’s programme, the district magistrate added. Vamsi said none of the junior doctors were arrested.

In their memorandum, the doctors had asked that the administration officials behave well with them, that adequate Covid-19 medicines are available and that the college’s central library be kept open for 24 hours, sources said.

“Around a dozen junior doctors were standing at the gate of the medical college to meet Adityanath. We wanted to request him to give us all PPE kits for the treatment of Covid-19 patients. We also wanted to tell him that there was no medicine for Covid-19 patients in the hospital. The college management and district officers threaten and harass us when we raise this issue,” a junior doctor who didn’t want to be identified told The Telegraph over phone on Monday evening.

The chief minister was visiting the hospital for a review meeting.

“Suddenly, some senior police officers and constables reached the spot and started kicking us with their boots and pushing us towards a jeep. They took six of us to Prem Nagar police station and detained us for about four hours. They released us when the chief minister left the city. We are sure that the chief minister knew about the incident because some of us had written to him earlier that we wanted to meet him,” the junior doctor added.

Subsequently, a meeting was held between the district magistrate and the principal of the medical college along with the junior doctors. The doctors were assured that their problems would be resolved soon.

Reacting to the incident, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in a Facebook post said: “The model of the UP government is to remain absent when needed, and indulge in false publicity, but arrest those who are in service of the public.”

“They had gone to present their three demands before the chief minister,” she said. “Are these demands wrong?