Gulf Times Friday, June 20, 2014
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INDIA
Life normal, say Kerala nurses in Baghdad IANS Thiruvananthapuram
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everal nurses, most of them from Kerala, yesterday said they were content working in Baghdad, unlike 46 others stranded in the northern Iraqi town of Tikrit. They said their lives were “normal” even after Sunni insurgents have overrun many parts of the country. Speaking by phone from Baghdad, a Kerala nurse said, “... while there is heavy checking, life is normal.” She said she lives in a complex at the Baghdad Medical City where there are 15 hospitals. “Since we live inside (the complex), there is no reason for us to feel unsafe. Our Iraqi colleagues tell us that so far they have not been affected at all. They say that in the evening, they go out with their families,” she said, adding Baghdad Medical City is around 15 minutes’ drive from the Baghdad airport. “The only difference is that there is lot of security...,” said the nurse, who did not wish to be identified. She said there are 74 nurses from India who work in the complex and 73 of them are from Kerala. They all arrived in Iraq early this year. Another nurse from Kerala who works in the Karbala region, around 70km from the Baghdad airport, also said things were normal there. She rebutted the notion that all parts of Iraq are reeling under insurgents’ attack. “Some TV channels back home are trying to generalise the issue here, which is not the truth. They went to my home in Kerala, and as parents are possessive, when they hear of trouble they feel that the entire country is affected.” “In our case, we do not have any issue at all. The management of our hospital has assured us that things are normal and there is no need to worry at all,” said the nurse, who too did not wish to be identified. However a nurse in Tikrit, the hometown of executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, said she and others were worried. “Today also the embassy officials called up and said that the roads towards the airport are still not clear. They have assured us that once things are clear, they will ensure that we return to India,” she said. The 46 Kerala nurses stranded in strife-torn Tikrit town in northern Iraq’s Nineveh prov-
ince on Wednesday asked the Indian embassy officials to either take them home or change their place of work. Meanwhile in New Delhi, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said the 40 Indian workers abducted in Iraq were safe and told the distraught families that the “very best” efforts were being made to have them freed. Swaraj told a delegation of families of seven of the abducted men that all 40 workers were safe but did not disclose where they were being held. The government was making all possible efforts to free the construction workers seized in Mosul, one of the major Iraqi cities overrun by Sunni insurgents. “I am personally mulling over all options. The government is making all kinds of efforts,” Swaraj told reporters. “The 40 men are safe... When the situation normalises, we will try to get them released,” she told the delegation that was accompanied by Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal. She said the men, who worked for a Turkish company and were mostly from Punjab, were holed up in a government building. A spokesperson for the family members said the minister told them that the workers were abducted while being taken to a safe place following an outbreak of fighting in Mosul. “The minister said blank passports and tickets would be issued to them so that they can be brought back when they are released,” said Manjit Singh G K, president of the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee. Manjit Singh was a part of the delegation that met the minister. Food Processing Industries Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal said meanwhile that the affected families in Punjab had been told to alert the authorities if they get a telephone call from the workers. She added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was personally monitoring the developments. “Our prime minister and the external affairs ministry are closely monitoring the situation,” Harsimrat Badal said. The mother of one of the Indians, Gurdeep Singh, expressed dismay over the mass abduction. “We don’t know where he is,” the woman said in Punjab. “He has not called for many days. I hope he is safe.”
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal sit in front of the relatives and family members of India workers kidnapped in Iraq, during a news conference in New Delhi yesterday.
Govt struggles with Iraq ‘kidnap’ crisis The foreign says it does not know who has taken the Indians hostage and that it has not received any ransom demand AFP New Delhi
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he new government struggled yesterday to make headway in its first foreign crisis as it tried to secure the release of 40 construction workers being held in war-torn Iraq, home to some 10,000 Indian expatriates. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already dispatched a former ambassador to Baghdad to co-ordinate rescue efforts while Parkash Singh Badal, chief minister of Punjab - where most of the workers hail from - has said he is willing to pay a ransom to gain their freedom. But while India’s foreign ministry has described the men as having been “kidnapped”, it says it does not know who has taken
them hostage and that it has not received any ransom demand. The ministry said yesterday it has learnt the location of the workers and was pursuing “every avenue” in a “tenuous security situation.” “In situations where there exists no single authority, where there exists no established interlocutors, we are trying to do our best in the circumstances,” foreign ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin told reporters. The ministry was working with aid agencies in Iraq including the Red Crescent Society which said the workers had been taken away by armed men while they were working on a stadium in Mosul. But the exact identity of their captors was not known. “We don’t know what happened to them,” Iraqi Red Crescent president Yaseen Ahmed Abbas said by phone from Baghdad. “It is difficult to talk to the insurgents, there is no official who we can talk to.” Underlining the confusion,
some of the family members told Indian media they had spoken to several of the workers who denied they were being “held hostage.” Charanjit Singh said he spoke for several minutes on Wednesday to his brother whose captors have claimed they would eventually be released. “He said he and his co-workers from India were all safe and not held hostage,” Singh told The Hindu newspaper. While India has a record of evacuating large numbers of its nationals from war zones, including from Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and from Lebanon in 2007, analysts say the situation this time is complicated by a variety of factors. In a front-page editorial headlined “First Foreign Policy Test for Modi,” The Hindustan Times said the prevailing chaos in Iraq made it hard for New Delhi to work out who to interact with. “Handling a crisis like this is a tough task. With the fighting
Push for Hindi risks widening communication divides Reuters New Delhi
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ince taking office as prime minister last month, Narendra Modi has taken a clear stand in support of Hindi, pushing for it to replace English as the preferred language of the capital’s urbane and golf-playing bureaucrats. Hindi and English are India’s two official languages for federal government business, although India’s constitution recognises a total of 22 languages. Modi’s government has ordered its officials to use Hindi on social media accounts and in government letters. Modi spoke in Hindi and used interpreters in meetings with South Asian leaders last month, and addressed the Bhutanese parliament in Hindi during his first official overseas trip last week. But with more than half of India’s 1.2bn people using another language as their mother tongue, the push for Hindi risks widening communication divides in a highly diverse country, especially in the southern and eastern
states, where local languages or English are preferred. The chief of Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party yesterday slammed India’s home ministry for its social media diktat.
“No one can deny it’s beginning to impose Hindi against one’s wish” The party, born in 1949 of a southern secessionist movement, uses Tamil and English to communicate with voters. “No one can deny it’s beginning to impose Hindi against one’s wish. This would be seen as an attempt to treat non-Hindi speakers as second-class citizens,” television channels quoted DMK chief M Karunanidhi as saying. In the eastern state of Odisha,
a member of the state assembly was chastised this week for using Hindi during the question hour. The speaker of the house ordered Kengam Surya Rao to make statements only in English or the local language, Odia. Anti-Hindi protests in India date back to before the country gained independence in 1947. Hindi speakers are concentrated in India’s northern and central regions, home to the country’s two most populous states and where the BJP picked up most of its parliamentary seats in the election. It is the mother tongue of just over 40% of Indians, the latest government data show. In the 1960s the DMK launched a campaign against the government’s plan to make Hindi the sole official language, during which Hindi books and effigies of a “Hindi demoness” were burnt on village bonfires. “Hindi is our official language, we have to promote Hindi,” junior home minister Kiren Rijiju said yesterday, following Karunanidhi’s criticism. “It doesn’t mean that we undermine the importance of regional languages.”
spreading, even evacuating people by road is not an option,” it said. “Rebels have seized swathes of territory. The Iraqi government’s writ doesn’t run in areas like Mosul or Tikrit. There is little New Delhi can hope to achieve through government channels.” The paper also warned many expatriates could resist efforts to evacuate them, saying most of a group of around 50 nurses working in Saddam Hussain’s former hometown of Tikrit had told the Indian mission they would like to stay put or be moved to other Iraqi towns. “Only 14 of the nurses want to leave the country which the UN has warned is on the verge of breaking up,” the paper said. Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said she was “leaving no stone unturned to find a solution to this.” “I’m personally supervising this,” she told reporters yesterday, without giving any details of the rescue efforts. But Delhi-based analyst Ajai
Sahni said the Modi-led government was “in a fix” and did not appear to have a coherent crisis strategy. “They don’t know who to contact or how to get thousands of our people out,” Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, said. “They will have no option but to go around begging neighbouring governments and local middlemen to save our people.” Manjeet Kripalani, an analyst for the Mumbai-based Gateway House think-tank, said the situation was further complicated by the reluctance of thousands of contract labourers who have been working in Iraq to leave without being paid. “If they leave right now, they won’t get their money and they need that money. It’s a difficult decision - to leave or to stay?” she said. “India’s priority is to get its captured citizens to safety. The others are given an option to leave or not, but are nevertheless warned of dangers.”
Modi likely to visit Japan after budget Agencies New Delhi
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Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin shakes hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during their meeting in New Delhi yesterday.
rime Minister Narendra Modi has postponed a visit to Japan which had been expected to take place early next month, the foreign ministry said yesterday. “The dates we were looking at for the visit in early July will now be reworked after PM Modi wrote to PM (Shinzo) Abe,” ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin told reporters in New Delhi. Although no reason was given for the delay, reports in the Indian media said Modi wanted to push back his departure until after his government’s first budget which is expected to be introduced in parliament in the second week of July. The spokesman said that Modi remains “very keen to visit Japan” and has written to Abe to discuss alternative dates. While Modi did visit Bhutan last weekend, his visit to Tokyo would have been his first trip to a major foreign capital since his landslide election in May. Modi has often been com-
pared to Abe, as both are staunch nationalists who were elected to office on pledges to revive their countries’ economic fortunes. Both countries also have a history of territorial disputes with China, although Modi has insisted that Beijing and Delhi should be “natural partners” rather than rivals. Meanwhile, Modi met Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin in New Delhi yesterday and described Russia as a “time tested friend. The prime minister appreciated Russia’s support in building India’s military capabilities. Modi said he intended to take the relationship with Russia to a higher level, a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office said. Rogozin conveyed President Vladimir Putin’s greetings to Modi, the statement added. He also communicated Putin’s desire to work with Modi and strengthen the “special and privileged strategic partnership between India and Russia.” Modi thanked Rogozin for Russia’s contribution to the realisation of aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, a major milestone in India’s naval capabilities.