
My daughter is panicking: Anxious wait for families of Indian students in Iran
The first evacuation flight from Iran that landed in New Delhi on Thursday morning comes as a ray of hope for the family members waiting for their loved ones to arrive.The ones left behind are anxious and are panicking, so the Indian government must hurry with the evacuation, said a couple from Richmond Town in Bengaluru whose daughter is studying medicine at Tehran University of Medical Sciences.advertisementIn an exclusive interview with PTI Videos, Imran Mehdi, father of Fareehy Mehdi, said there was a blast very near to where his daughter was staying a couple of days ago.
"My daughter does not know how to survive in war-like situations. She is panicking so much already. So, I am requesting our Prime Minister and our External Affairs Minister to get all the Indian citizens stuck there as early as possible," said Shabana Mehdi, Fareehy's mother.Imran said when he spoke to his daughter on June 13, he realised the gravity of the situation and tried to get her back immediately."But I could find tickets only for June 15 on Air Arabia. By then, the airspace was already closed for commercial flights.So, she is stuck there," he added.The couple also expressed their gratitude to the Indian government for moving their daughter to a "safer" place.advertisement"We were told that a batch of students had been moved to Armenia, which is about six to seven hours from where my daughter is staying. She is still in Iran though. We do not know exactly where she is, as we were told that it is being kept a secret for their safety," said the mother.Stating that they have only been communicating through WhatsApp messages for now, Shabana said she is still worried about the safety of her daughter and spends sleepless nights."The internet connection is also not stable there. So, we are not sure how long this will last," said Imran."It's been five days now since I made the last video call to her. It's a terrible state for a mother to be in. I speak on behalf of all the parents. There are 10,500 medical students and 4,000 other students from India there. So I request the government to evacuate them as soon as possible," added Shabana.The first flight carrying 110 Indian students, who were evacuated to Armenia from war-torn Iran, landed in Delhi in the early hours on Thursday.Amid escalating conflict between Israel and Iran, Indian students in Tehran were moved out of the city, 110 of them crossing the border into Armenia, through arrangements made by the Indian Embassy on Tuesday under 'Operation Sindhu'.Tune InMust Watch
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Hans India
37 minutes ago
- Hans India
Omar Abdullah deliberately politicising water sharing with Punjab: AAP
Chandigarh: The Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab on Friday questioned Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah's remarks that 'we will not give water from the Indus River to Punjab' and accused him of deliberately politicising the issue. AAP spokesperson Neel Garg said the authority to decide on river waters lies with the Central government, and Omar Abdullah cannot take a unilateral decision on this matter. He emphasised that Punjab needs water and, therefore, Punjab should also get a share of the Indus River water, adding that during the war with Pakistan, the Indian government had decided to annul the Indus Water Treaty. 'Now, it is the Indian government's responsibility to appropriately distribute the remaining water and give Punjab its rightful share,' he said. Garg pointed out that like Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab is also a border state. 'Whenever war occurs, Punjab becomes the battleground. And when the country needs food grains, it becomes the granary of the nation. Now that there is water available, Punjab has a legitimate claim over it.' He highlighted that Punjab needs water today, as most of its regions have entered the dark zone. 'In the process of filling the nation's granaries, we have been deprived of our own water. Now that the Indus Water Treaty has been annulled, Punjab has the primary right over this water because it will not only bring relief to our barren lands but also boost our agriculture. When farmers prosper, the nation prospers,' he said. Garg added that Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann also stated, after the annulment of the Indus Treaty, that Punjab should receive a share of the water that is being prevented from flowing to Pakistan. 'Therefore, the government of India must consider this matter,' he said. The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) also expressed surprise at Omar Abdullah's statement. In a statement, former Minister and senior SAD leader Daljit Singh Cheema said what Omar Abdullah was demanding was another attempt to do injustice to Punjab. He said that while filling the food bowl of the country, Punjab had lost its groundwater, which had fallen to alarming levels. He said the quantity of water in rivers had also gone down substantially, adding that the farmers of Punjab had taken huge debt on their shoulders to fulfil the food requirement of the country. Earlier, speaking on constructing a canal by the government of India to divert excess water from three rivers of the Indus system in Jammu and Kashmir to Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan, Chief Minister Abdullah cited the 45-year-old Shahpur Kandi barrage dispute with Punjab and asked, 'Did they give us water?'
&w=3840&q=100)

Business Standard
43 minutes ago
- Business Standard
Operation Sindhu: Iran opens airspace for Indian evacuation flights
Iran opens airspace exclusively for Indian flights as India begins evacuating students from conflict-hit nation under Operation Sindhu Prateek Shukla New Delhi Iran has made a rare exception by permitting Indian evacuation flights to transit its otherwise restricted airspace, according to a report by NDTV. The move supports Operation Sindhu, launched by the Indian government to rescue its citizens from conflict-affected regions in Iran. The first flight carrying Indian students is expected to land in Delhi tonight at 11:00 pm IST. Two additional flights are scheduled for Saturday—one in the morning and another in the evening. Exclusive airspace access amid escalating tensions Iranian airspace has largely been closed to international flights due to continuing missile and drone attacks linked to the conflict with Israel. Despite the broader restrictions, India has been granted an exclusive air corridor to ensure the safe passage of its nationals. India formally announced Operation Sindhu on Wednesday. The Indian Embassy in Tehran is coordinating closely with the Iranian foreign ministry, particularly after reports emerged of injuries among Indian students. 'India accords highest priority to the safety and security of Indian nationals abroad,' stated the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Thousands of Indians in Iran, many in northern regions There are over 4,000 Indian nationals living in Iran, with roughly half of them being students. A significant number are located in northern regions where military activity has intensified. Earlier this week, 110 students were relocated from northern Iran to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, by road. This effort was jointly managed by Indian diplomatic missions in Tehran and Yerevan. A special flight departed from Yerevan at 14:55 hours on 18 June, arriving in New Delhi in the early hours of June 19. Alongside the stranded students, many Indian pilgrims, including 28 from Lucknow, remain stuck in Iran. They began their journey on May 27 from India to Iraq and crossed into Iran on June 9. Their planned pilgrimage included visits to religious sites in Karbala, Mashhad, Tehran, Nishapur, and Kashan. A large number of these pilgrims had completed Haj, which ended with Eid on Monday, before proceeding to Iran—a route commonly followed by Shia pilgrims visiting holy shrines. Aqeel Jafar Rizvi, a tour operator with Mehndi Tours and Travels, told The Times of India, 'Over 1,000 pilgrims from Lucknow are currently in Iran, and many are facing difficulties due to a shortage of funds and limited access to essential medicines.' Shia cleric Maulana Saif Abbas has written to the MEA urging action. Gratitude expressed to regional partners 'The Indian government is grateful to the governments of Iran and Armenia for facilitating the safe passage of Indian nationals through their territories,' said an MEA spokesperson. The evacuated students were enrolled at Urmia Medical University in Iran's West Azerbaijan province, near the Turkish border— an area that has recently seen increased military movement. Of the 110 students evacuated, 90 are from Jammu and Kashmir, according to the Jammu and Kashmir Students' Association.


Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
A different nationalism: Let's go back to our Constitution
Written by Rahul Govind I will have to respectfully differ with the arguments of Yogendra Yadav and Akeel Bilgrami on nationalism. Bilgrami speaks of the 'unselfconscious pluralism' characterising 'centuries of Indian society', as reflected in Gandhian nationalism ('An alternative nationalism', IE, June 16), while Yadav maintains that once the modern Indian state is taken as a successor to Indian civilisation, the task is to define its 'cultural traits' ('The rediscovery of India', IE, June 5). Nirmal Verma is offered as a starting point for imagining a 'positive nationalism' that could save Indian civilisation from its 'inner disintegration' under colonialism (and the post-colonial state). This despite Yadav acknowledging that Verma 'hints at Hindus [being] the custodians of national unity and integrity', that he 'equivocated' on the role of Islam in Indian civilisation and exhibited a 'pronounced unease, if not denial, of the question of caste inequality' ('A critic of the modern Indian mind', IE, June, 17). Is this the beginning of a rethinking, or is this, instead, a pale reflection of the majoritarianism of the times? Indian nationalism drew on India's past, but drew equally from a global heritage involving ideas such as popular sovereignty and fundamental rights. Even after the Gandhian intervention and mass nationalism in the early 1920s, several factors led to the nationalist agenda, including critical reform on land and caste. This broadening of the terrain of struggle over social and economic rights was not sui generis to the initial Gandhian intervention. It was due to popular movements, and figures like B R Ambedkar, as well as Communists and Socialists. The crowning achievement was the Indian Constitution, which enshrined ideals regarding fundamental rights and universal franchise as well as social protections and land reform. Seeped in our consciousness of Indian nationalism is Gandhi's humiliation at the hands of racists on that infamous train from Durban to Pretoria. Much less known is Ambedkar's experience in Chalisgaon in 1929, in the midst of the national movement. As a part of a committee, appointed by the Bombay government to investigate caste oppression, he alighted at the railway station of Chalisgaon. When he was about to start his journey towards Maharwada, 'the quarters of the untouchables', he couldn't find a single tonga. After an hour or so, when he got one and paced towards his destination, the cart crashed, the horse bolted, and he was, in his own words, 'thrown down on the stone pavement', which resulted in a fractured leg and serious injuries. The accident occurred because the driver had never driven a tonga before. He was forced to do so because no tonga driver would agree to seat a Dalit in his carriage. In the same text, Waiting for a Visa, Ambedkar writes of a doctor refusing to attend to a Dalit's wife, resulting in her death. Just two years before the Chalisgaon incident, Ambedkar had the Manusmriti publicly burned in response to upper-caste attacks on Dalits who had drawn water from a public water tank. This kind of response against Dalits organising to access public spaces, schools, roads, and temples was not unusual. At the Mahad Satyagraha, Ambedkar invoked the ideals of the French Revolution, as he was to do in his Annihilation of Caste. Caste oppression was more fully addressed by the national movement because of popular campaigns around rights to representation, land and identity by figures like Ambedkar, who combated inherited legacies of discrimination using a global vocabulary of democratic rights. The inclusivity of the national movement, therefore, was not a civilisational inheritance. In the 1930s, Gandhi too invoked the 'secular' in the context of untouchability and temple entry, just as he came to accept the demand for a Constituent Assembly, a wholly 'modern' idea. There is a view that caste oppression was not native to our civilisation, but was imposed by the colonial state. Even if we credit the British with unmatched capacities in collective hypnosis, this argument cannot be taken seriously. Certainly, the British had no intention of establishing equality. But it is patently false to attribute caste violence and its hierarchical social arrangements solely to the colonial state, denying any role to Indians or Indian history. That caste hierarchy was a social and political reality before colonial rule is well established. Notwithstanding the riches of India's heritage, it would be historically inaccurate to think that one could find there a grammar for universal franchise, popular sovereignty, and justiciable fundamental rights, those distinctive features of our Constitution. This grammar emerged from a global conjuncture, and cannot be traced to any one historical or civilisational heritage, whether 'Western' or 'Indian'. The idea of a nation-state may be taken to be a political form where the nation, or the people, exercise sovereignty, expressed by institutional protocols such as elections, and regulated by norms such as equality, fundamental rights, including gender rights. The emergence of these ideas, including equality and liberty, cannot be understood without reference to revolutions such as the ones in France and Haiti. But these ideals were not intrinsic to some a priori nation called 'France', and it was not long before Napoleon reestablished the empire and slavery. Such ideals were not institutionalised in any 'Western' country, 'internally' or 'externally'. One can speak here of violent empires, not nation-states, arguably until the post-Second World War order. The contention that the ills of the day are caused by a small 'westernised' elite, and that one has to reach back to a corralled history, civilisational past or the nationalist movement to address contemporary challenges, is to misunderstand the past as much as the present. Nationalism ought to be judged good or ill depending on the extent to which it embodies popular will and universal values such as equality. Struggles over representation, caste, gender, federalism and welfare in the post-colonial state have parallels with the national movement as well as with those the world over, simply because a particular language of rights and constitution-making emerged in modernity. It is to the Constitution and a modern global heritage of rights and values that these movements turn. The benchmark of nationalism can only be the Constitution, a revolutionary and transformative document, not the echo of an ever-existing civilisational heritage. The writer teaches History at Delhi University