NEW DELHI: Sanan Khursheed is among a group of 45 male and female students who returned from Indian Punjab to their homes in Kashmir, six days after the Pahalgam terror attack, Indian media reported.
Among the anguished students are those who had to face the music at the hands of miscreants amid a wave of attacks which were reported from Kharar, Dera Bassi, Hoshiarpur, Chandigarh, Jalandhar and some other parts of Punjab. A youngster at the Universal Group of Institutions (UGI) in Lalru town of Mohali said that the Kashmiri students were targeted by a group of non-Punjabi students armed with iron rods and knives.
A Kashmiri girl student at the UGI was allegedly manhandled and dragged by her hair before she managed to run away along with another female Kashmiri student. A video of the distraught girl narrating her ordeal in front of some Punjabi youngsters who had come to her rescue went viral on social media.
A source said that the victim was flown back to Srinagar along with two more girl students by their family after the attack. Ummat Shabir, a nursing student at the Rayat-Bahra University, who was staying in a private accommodation in Mohali, said that she didn’t come out of her room after the news of the Pahalgam attack broke on April 22.
Most students of Rayat-Bahra University were confined to their hostels and private accommodations with the university officials plainly refusing to guarantee their security amid growing tensions.
Meanwhile, facing imminent expulsion from the country, a Pakistani woman pleaded with Indian authorities to allow her to stay with her young children after her marriage ended in violence and divorce, leaving her vulnerable in Bareilly. Iram Hasan, 38, who holds a Pakistani passport, sought intervention after authorities ordered her to leave India by May 1.
Iram, a resident of Lahore, married Mohd Athar, a Bareilly local, in Pakistan in Oct 2008 and moved to India after six months. Over the past decade, she made several visits to India to be with her two children: a son, Shahnoor, now 17, and a daughter, Ayesha, 7. Shahnoor studies at Central School in Bareilly.
Meanwhile, two Pakistani women, married to Indians, seek to stay. The two Pakistani nationals are - Maryam, who had arrived in India on a short term visa and was married to Aamir, a resident of UP’s Bulandshahar district, and Seema Haider, who had crossed the border to marry her Indian lover Sachin Meena two years back and is currently living in Greater Noida. While Maryam is three months pregnant, Seema had given birth to a baby girl a few months ago. Both the women have made an appeal to the Indian government to let them stay in India and not to deport them to Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Indian screenwriter, lyricist and poet Javed Akhtar says India’s respect for Pakistan artistes hasn’t been reciprocated. “There is hardly any warmth today in India-Pakistan cultural ties. This is not the time to even think about whether Pakistani artists should be allowed to work in India.”
He added that Pakistani artists such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali and Noor Jehan were welcomed with open arms by Indian authorities in the past but this wasn’t reciprocated by the Pakistani government.