A season of war presents an extraordinary situation. The multitudes getting caught in it are bound to face odds, miseries, loss of property and even lives. It’s natural that the thousands of Indian students doing MBBS in Ukraine were caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea. For days, they could neither remain there nor get out. Under the circumstances, the Indian government has overall done an excellent job in evacuating over 20,000 of its nationals from there in a fortnight of the war; a few hundreds are still left behind in what was a battlefield. The Operation Ganga involved scores of flights evacuating and airlifting the stranded citizens back to India. All these and their further transport to their homes were done free, at government expense.
Many students are thankful the government helped them at this critical hour; and many are livid at the “delay” caused for their evacuation and the “unhelpful” responses from the Indian embassy in capital Kyiv. Groups of students have refused to accept roses extended to them at the airports by Union ministers. Despite the central government going out of its way to airlift its nationals back home and even sending as many as four ministers to neighbouring Poland, Romania etc to facilitate Operation Ganga, there are complaints galore. These are mostly about the way the embassy in Kyiv went into non-responsive mode, the diplomatic mission staff remaining incommunicado and doing little to even pass on information to the affected Indians there by its official website.
Information these days is easy to disseminate, thanks also to the internet, official web sites, social media pages and WhatsApp. Those who kept track of the official and social media pages of the Indian embassy in Kyiv, including parents here, were hugely disappointed that the embassy was rarely speaking up – a few ‘advisories’, but no word even about the flights getting ready under Operation Ganga. It had no information about the spread of Indians in Ukraine. Those of us who lived abroad are not surprised at such attitudes of Indian diplomatic missions. Indian diplomats are not accessible and they conduct themselves in imperial styles; their attitudes shaped by a hangover of the past — a mix of the British Raj and Royal era styles; a Raja-Praja style. This is unlike the way diplomatic corps of other nations conduct themselves. Even the Chinese diplomats are warm and down to earth; and so are the Pakistanis. Other diplomats do a lot of PR for their nations, which is what ‘diplomacy all about; but our stiff-necked men are not cut out for that.
