By Tora Agarwala
GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) – A fleet of taxis, a security escort, and a harrowing six-hour journey brought Asif Hussain and about 80 other Indian students back home on Friday from Bangladesh, where violence has erupted between protesters and security forces.
At least 20 people have been killed in the clashes this week – most of them in the capital Dhaka – with police firing tear gas and rubber bullets to scatter protesters who also torched vehicles and establishments. The protesters oppose a system of quotas for government jobs.
Some mobile internet services were cut off on Thursday and telecom links remained widely disrupted on Friday.
For Hussain, who studies at a private medical college in Bangladesh’s Manikganj district, about 50 km (30 miles)from Dhaka, being cut off from his family in India was especially “stressful”.
“Our college was not affected by the violence but we heard there was trouble in the town (about 15 minutes away),” he told Reuters.
As news came in of students being killed in Dhaka, Hussain and about 80 others from his college hired private taxis to travel to the border that Bangladesh shares with India’s eastern state of West Bengal, about 170 km away.
The Indian High Commission (embassy) in Bangladesh also provided the students with a security escort after they requested for it, Hussain said.
Leaving their college at 2.30 a.m., the group reached the border six hours later but crossed it only in the afternoon after clearing immigration.
For Hussain, the journey will continue for another day as he travels to his hometown, Dhubri, in Assam state.
“It has been very scary…I have (still) not been able to speak to many of my friends in Dhaka,” he said.
Around 8,500 Indians are studying in Bangladesh – many of them pursuing medicine – India’s foreign ministry says, and about 15,000 Indians live in the country.
Bangladesh’s history is closely intertwined with India, which intervened on the side of Bengali nationalists in their 1971 war of independence against Pakistan.
India’s Meghalaya state, which too shares a border with Bangladesh, is also helping to evacuate people, with officials saying more than 350 students from India, Nepal and Bhutan have entered through this route so far.
In an advisory, India urged its citizens in Bangladesh to minimise movement outside their residences. The foreign ministry on Friday said that all Indians in Bangladesh were safe.
Nepal similarly said it was “closely monitoring” the situation in Bangladesh, where around 3,000 of its citizens study and another 50 work with the United Nations and other international organisations.
(Reporting by Tora Agarwala, Additional reporting by Kathmandu newsroom; writing by Sakshi Dayal; editing by Angus MacSwan)
