Suspected members of some Hindutva organisations allegedly entered the Doon School campus in Dehradun a few days ago and demolished an old mazar, claiming that the structure had been recently built.

The school has not filed any formal complaint about the incident and the district administration is not known to have taken any concrete action although videos on social media purport to show five men with pickaxes and hammers demolishing the tomb.

Dehradun district magistrate Sachin Bansal told reporters: “It was an old mazar at a corner inside the school boundary. Some people allegedly climbed the wall a few days ago and demolished the structure. I sent a sub-divisional magistrate as soon as I came to know aboutthe incident on Friday. However, the school has not lodged any formal complaint against anybody.”

The Doon School, one of India’s most prestigious institutions, has a long history of notable alumni, including authors Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his son and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, and Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia. The campus is a high-security zone, given that the children of India’s wealthiest and most influential families study there.

A video posted on social media shows people digging the mazar with spades.

A member of the Uttarakhand waqf board claimed that till a few months ago,the mazar was on the list of properties it owned.

“We have not checked the records in the last five years but this mazar, built on 57 acres, was our property. We need to find out whether any change was made in the land records,” said a waqf official.

But Uttarakhand waqf board chairman Shadab Shams said: “We are trying to gather details but wedon’t have any formal information on the demolition of the structure.”

The head of the Right-wing group Sanatan Sanskriti, Radha Dhoni, said: “I live near the school and could see the construction of the mazar till a few weeks ago. It was not an old structure. We had met the chief minister (Pushkar Singh Dhami) a few days ago and he had agreed to our demand that the structure must be removed from its current location.”

The president of the Uttarakhand Raksha Abhiyan, Swami Darshan Bharati, said about 5,000 acres of government land in Uttarakhand had been encroached on by religious groups. “The CM has ordered that those plotsbe freed.”

The outfits didn’t say whether their members were involved in the demolition, but supported the action.

The BJP’s Dhami has yet to react to the incident but a source in the school told reporters: “It was an old structure where no religious activity was happening. There are two walls of the campus and this was not inside the inner wall. Some government officials had visited theplace a few days ago to survey the area but they didn’t tell us that there was any chance of its demolition.”