Time for self-introspection
The tragic death of a 20-year-old Nepali female student, reportedly by suicide — her body was found in her hostel room — at a university in Odisha, has sent shockwaves not only in the educational world but also through diplomatic and political circles in India. The fracas caused by the incident, which was followed by some unjustified and high-handed action by the university authorities, has also raised important questions on our attitude to foreigners. It not only created a political firestorm in Odisha, but also caused a diplomatic row with Nepal, but luckily was handled deftly and effectively by the Indian government.
Rotarians need to look at this incident and its aftermath closely and with great seriousness particularly at this moment in time, when the search committee of The Rotary Foundation has done India the honour of designating the Symbiosis International University in Pune as the venue for establishing its ninth Peace Center. This centre will get many foreign scholars.
As my detailed article on how India managed to clinch this Peace Center, which will get a handsome grant of $15 million from TRF, (pg 16) shows, one of the criteria that the search committee members who visited Pune in August and spent two days there to satisfy themselves on this choice, was on the ability of the city, and the country, to welcome, accommodate and absorb foreign students. The committee members wanted to make sure if Pune as a city, and India as a country, had the right cultural ethos to open their hearts to foreign guests/students. Remember Indian tourism’s famous tag line: Athithi Devo Bhava (A guest is like a god)?
Luckily, both Pune, which incidentally gets the largest contingent of foreign students, mainly Africans, and India, passed the acid test and we will soon be cheering Rotary’s next Peace Center in India.
But, now let’s do some self-introspection. As a recent editorial titled ‘India, teach thyself’ in The Times of India pointed out, the Odisha incident is a wake-up call for the GoI which wants India to become an education hub for foreign students. It recalls how we were all angry when in 2013 a global survey put India among the most racist countries in the world. “But ask students from Africa who have suffered racial abuse here. Also, our record on our own people from the Northeast isn’t great either. Surveys have shown how they were stigmatised as ‘Chinese’ during the Covid pandemic,” it notes.
The good news is that most of us do not belong to a category unwelcoming of those whose colour, culture and nationality are different from ours. Surely India is among the favourite-most countries for Rotary exchange students. Several Rotarians who have hosted foreign students years ago still remain “second parents” for many such youngsters. Is this then the proverbial case of a few rotten apples…?
Also, in 1971 Dr S B Mujumdar established Symbiosis mainly to support international students, particularly from Africa, who came to study in India and suffered various forms of discrimination. Today it educates over 40,000 students from over 80 countries on its many campuses!
Rotary is making earnest efforts to build peace in a world that is mired in conflict and violence like never before… Russia vs Ukraine, Israel vs Palestine, the Syrian cauldron and so on. In a short span of hardly 18 months, two new Peace Centers have been announced. Apart from a conflicted world, we also live in ironic times. Take for instance Rotary’s DEI mantra… while we try to embrace it, how ridiculous is it that the new administration of the country, where Rotary was born, is trying to throw it out of the window, at least in official administrative circles.
Ponder over that…
Rasheeda Bhagat
