SOS: Save our students

Friday May 29, 2009

It’s with a lot of dreams that parents in India send their children for studies abroad, often under the burden of massive loans and even heavier expectations – from the extended family, friends and society. So when their kids are attacked abroad, mostly by lumpens and racists who, having themselves failed to do something substantial blame innocent desis for taking their jobs away, it breaks more than the heart. It breaks the trust in multicultural global cities being safe and free of the fetters of race and colour. It breaks the faith in the government of India for not acting strongly and swiftly enough. And it breaks faith in the 21st century youth who you’d feel have gone beyond the southern-northern, white-black, pale-brown, first world-developing world divide, something that their fathers and grand fathers were much more seized with.

The fears are already starting to form. In Chandigarh, which routes the passage of 20,000 students just to Australia in a year, anxious parents are lining up at the doors of immigration agencies which handled the visa processing work and are dialing their sons and daughters in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth. If the attacks on vulnerable Indian students continue, many parents would soon stop sending their children out of the country and halt all talk of their kids applying to universities down under, even in UK, USA and Canada.

Though it’s too early to assume Australia is being swamped by angry youths out to terrorize Indian students and eventually drive them out, the growth of neo-Nazi groups and ultra nationalists across the western world is worrisome. France, Italy, Germany, Russia, UK, Turkey, Spain, USA – the list is growing – have not been spared the shame. In a recent post Al Jazeera talks of how ``a good example of the right wing flexing their muscles was seen in February when a record 6,000 neo-Nazis marched (in Dresden) to commemorate the Allied bombing of Dresden during the second world war.’’ One witness is quoted as saying the marchers were ``very aggressive’’.

The economic slowdown and recession in many of these countries may not be helping matters at a time when unemployment and lack of revenue sources are drying up. America in the recent presidential elections agonized about its jobs coming to India. `Bangalored’ is something that has now seeped into that country’s lexicon. And in Britain there will be many openly unhappy with the distinct possibility of brown overwhelming white in the next decade or so. Air France is allegedly already making a habit of racial abuse. Frustration needs a channel and what better target than helpless and young Indians studying abroad. Ready fodder.

One can imagine how Australia might have reacted had one of its nationals, that too a student, been killed or kicked by enraged Indians. To that extent, external affairs minister SM Krishna has spoken up angrily and upped the diplomatic ante and word has come from Australia that it will punish the offenders, but more hard talk and call for security needs to be made to assuage feelings of fear among the Indian student diaspora, cowering in anxiety right now in lands alien to them. After all, they are paying huge sums of money to study in foreign colleges and universities, and the least they can expect is for themselves and their friends to be safe.

Blog post by Anand Soondas in Times of India