Indians get more respect than many others, looking forward to return, says Kolkata resident studying in Dhaka

Pinaki Nath, a photography student at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, shares his experiences and solidarity with Bangladesh.

Pinaki Nath, studying photography at Dhaka’s famed Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, had come home to Kolkata during a semester break when trouble began in Bangladesh. He was to return on July 16, but by then the situation had got so bad that going back would have been like walking into trouble.

Today he is eager to go back, more to check on his Bangladeshi friends than to finish his course. The friends, after all, made his four years in Dhaka memorable and worth returning to — only, of course, if and when the situation permits.

“In September 2022, I was down with dengue, so bad that I had to be hospitalised. I have no family or relatives in Dhaka, no one to seek help. It was my Bangladeshi friends who got me admitted to a hospital and took care of me. I have so many friends there now, not just photographers but also people from other fields. I am eager to go back to see them,” Mr. Nath told The Hindu.

According to him, the time he has spent in Bangladesh so far has been memorable, and that he stands in solidarity with the protesting students who eventually succeeded in removing an “autocratic leader”. He said Bangladesh also has students from other south Asian countries such as Nepal and Pakistan, but that it is Indian students who always get more respect than others.

“In the four years I have spent there, I have always noticed that Indian students are given priority over others, even over local students. Each time I go back there, I have to go through a student registration process, which happens very quickly in my case. Once I had to rush home because my mother was unwell, and I got the visa in a day. This is not the kind of treatment even their own students get,” Mr. Nath said.

“But now after this massive revolt, I think Bangladesh will respect its students more than before. After all, they are the trigger for this mass uprising. I would call this a mass protest than just a quota protest because even though it started as a students’ movement, it grew into a mass movement with ordinary people, artists, photographers, and members of civil society joining it. Even people in West Bengal stood up in solidarity,” he said.

In his opinion, the uprising was the result of bottled-up anger against the Sheikh Hasina government, and the real trigger was not so much the announcement of reservation in jobs for descendants of those who had participated in the Liberation War but what he called ‘rigged elections’.