ISLAMABAD, March 4: While outrage over the Modi government’s failure to conduct timely evacuation operation Ukraine is growing, a video of Indian students thanking Pakistani officials for helping them flee Lviv, a city in the country’s west in the midst of war, has emerged.
“You can see, these are all Pakistani students here. We are four Indians only,” a student can be heard saying in a relaxed environment pointing to his fellow travelers. They all are having meals apparently at the Pakistani embassy.
The student alleges that when they arrived in Lviv from Khakhiv, they found no one present at a makeshift Indian embassy office set up in an emergency.
Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, on Thursday, conformed that “distressed” Indian students were helped by Pakistani of ficials on “humanitarian grounds” in Lviv. He said most Pakistani students have left the country.
Professor Ashok Swain, a known Modi critic who teaches international relations at a Swedish university, shared the video on Twitter with a caption: “Indian embassy officials are missing at the Romanian border. Pakistan Embassy helping Indian students to escape war in the Ukraine!”
Reacting to the video, Anirudh Agarwal, a professor at Jindal Global University gratuitously wrote that Pakistanis have always helped Indians outside India. “Never met a single Pakistani who carries politics on his/her sleeves,” he said.
Indian students stranded in Ukraine are fuming over lack of substantial help from the embassy even as the situation was escalating.
Meanwhile, students from South Asia and Africa complained that they faced racist behaviour from Ukrainians while boarding trains or crossing the border. They were either pushed out or made to wait for hours on the border while locals and westerners get preferable treatment. The students say they are being discriminated against on account of their colour and racial background.
“They (Ukrainian guards) allow 30 Indians only after 500 Ukrainians get in. To get to this border you need to walk 4 to 5 kilometres from the first checkpoint to the second one. Ukrainians are given taxis and buses to travel, all other nationalities have to walk. They were very racist to Indians and other nationalities,” Saakshi Ijantkar, an Indian national fleeing the war, told media.
“If you are Black, you should walk,” one Nigerian student told media. In some instances the students were stopped at the Polish border and forced to walk back miles. The students said they had to spend nights in freezing cold without any shelter while waiting to cross the border. Videos and reports by students splashed on the internet showed them being prevented from leaving the war-ravaged country. -PR
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