Posted on 06/02/2002 5:38:52 PM PDT by Nexus
The only question: when do you leave?
As the Foreign Office advises Britons to get out of India while they still can, a sense of utter panic has suddenly gripped the expatriate community
Observer Worldview
Luke Harding
Sunday June 2, 2002
The Observer
It has always been a popular haunt with Delhi's expatriates. With its trendy espresso bar, music shop selling wide-screen televisions and highbrow bookshop, Khan Market is the perfect place to relax on a Saturday afternoon.
But yesterday the market was ghostly and deserted. The diplomatic wives normally out hunting for luxury ice cream had vanished. Instead, among the Britons and Americans still stranded in Delhi, there was only one topic of conversation: when are you getting out?
It is no exaggeration to say that Jack Straw's less-than-subtle hint on Friday afternoon that India stands on the brink of nuclear war has provoked utter panic. Most foreigners have followed the escalating crisis between India and Pakistan over the past three weeks with growing anxiety. Few had anticipated that it would affect them directly. It has.
Yesterday, those left behind in India's Lutyens-designed capital, with its wide boulevards and green neem trees, were desperately dialling their travel agents. 'We were completely freaked out by Jack Straw's remarks,' Barbara McKinlay, whose husband, Nick, works for the Aga Khan Foundation in Delhi, said last night. 'Shortly afterwards, the BBC and CNN disappeared from the telly. We went to the Foreign Office website, which advised us to leave India.'
Yesterday, Mrs McKinlay was on Virgin Atlantic's lunchtime flight back to Britain - and the comparative safety of Brighton - with her two children, Christian, nine, and Amelia, seven. 'A nuclear war would be so horrific for the world, never mind for our personal life here. I hope it won't happen. Nick is leaving on Wednesday or Thursday,' she added.
The British High Commission in New Delhi announced yesterday that all but 40 staff deemed essential were leaving. At an emergency meeting on Friday evening, staff were told the situation was deeply serious and they had no alternative but to leave. The Commission's Barrat-style suburban bungalows were alive yesterday with the sound of middle-class packing and of luggage being dumped into the boots of gleaming diplomatic Land Rovers.
More than 200 staff and family members have been told to get out by Wednesday. They are leaving on commercial flights. Officials are keen to stress that their departure does not amount to an 'evacuation' - but it adds up to the same thing. Those staying behind are pondering what to do next - and how to run away from a nuclear explosion.
'I thought I might sod off to Bangalore [in southern India],' Simon Mackay, who works for an engineering company in Delhi, said as he dropped his wife, Ashleigh, and children, Holly, nine, and Harry, six, at Delhi's international airport. They are flying home to Sudbury in Suffolk. 'If commercial flights stop and things get scary, I guess I'll jump on a train or drive out of the city,' he added optimistically.
Other expatriates are booking tickets to Calcutta - too far away for Pakistan to hit, probably - and distant Sri Lanka. Nobody is under any illusions that, in the event of a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, Delhi is likely to be the first place that Pakistan's ruler General Musharraf will choose to attack. It would take between three and five minutes for a nuclear missile fired from Pakistan to land on the Indian capital.
The first most residents would know about it would be a glaring white flash, by which time it would be too late. It is this horrific scenario that is prompting almost all major India-based organisations to get their foreign workers out now.
The UN announced yesterday that it was pulling all its non-essential staff, and dependants, out of Pakistan and India. The International Committee for the Red Cross is doing the same thing. A large number of expatriates working for British Gas in Delhi are leaving, too. So are several foreign missionaries who are relocating to southern India.
Even the chairman of governors at Delhi's friendly British School sent round an email late on Friday night announcing his sudden departure. 'As you may have heard, the British High Commission here advised all Brits to think seriously of pulling out. We've thunk, and are on our way home,' it read.
On Friday, in a move carefully co-ordinated with London, the US State Department urged the 60,000 Americans living in India to leave and said its non-essential diplomatic staff would also be pulling out. Yesterday, France also joined a long list of countries that have advised their nationals to leave. Others include Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Leah Wright, the American manager of a Delhi-based call centre, held an emergency meeting with her 10 US staff. They discovered they had two Amex cards between them. With them, they bought 'very expensive' tickets out of India on yesterday's Virgin flight to London. 'We got home at 3am and packed up all our things. This took until 6am. I had a shower and set off for the airport. We had no sleep at all.'
'We don't think the situation is life-threatening, but we want to get out while we can,' she said. Last night, Wright was on her way home to Salt Lake City in Utah - and safety.
India's Foreign Secretary, Jaswant Singh, has expressed surprise at the exodus. And on Friday, at a security conference in Singapore, the Defence Secretary, George Fernandes, insisted that the situation on the border with Pakistan remained 'stable', despite the fact that a million men have been eyeball to eyeball there since January.
And yet there are subtle signs that India is already beginning to prepare its vast population for the coming war. The normally reliable Star news channel carried a report yesterday claiming that 2,000-3,000 al-Qaeda fighters were now gathering in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and preparing to attack India.
Already, fact is beginning to blur into propaganda. India's newspapers made a stab yesterday at normality and carried front-page photos of France's World Cup defeat by Senegal, and the hapless goalkeeper Fabien Barthez fumbling the ball.
But there is a growing sense among India's political establishment and its savvy middle class that it is no longer a question of whether India and Pakistan will go to war, but when. Many expatriates leave India in June because of the extreme heat - and the imminent monsoon, which transforms Delhi's roads into grid-locked canals. But this time those leaving are starting to realise they may never come back.
And India believes these supposed couple thousand people make it necessary to put at risk of nuclear war populations numbering a billion people? Common.... A nuke is the only response they have to a few thousand adversaries? Common....what is really going on?
Now to my way of thinking, this evacuation of U.S. and British foreign nationals may be a way for us to try to bring these idiots to their senses. How many people make their livings on these 60,000 or so citizens of U.S.? Will their leaving be a wake-up call to India to find another way to confront the problem of a few thousand terrorists other than threatening the lives of millions?
Just in case nobody's thought of it, it's not too late.
But, start a little nuclear saber-rattling, and the brave Brits scurry for the exits as fast as their little legs will carry them...(To be fair, diplomats are not known for being especially brave, anyway).
I agree. They have a nuclear war and the next day thousands of people on both sides are dead and cities are garbage heaps. Who wins under that scenario? And if you did win would it have been worth it? The horrible effects of nuclear war would make the reasons why it was waged seem insignificant. I think newspapers like to pump this up a bit to sell papers. And I agree that getting the foreigners out of there will make the two sides realise that they need to calm themselves down.
'tis an ill wind that blows no good. (Big Grin)
Right. Maybe they should simply submit and srrender to terrorism. So should all of us when the time comes, I suppose!
I'm hoping that India will take care of the blasting, and not with conventional weapons.
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