From besieged Ukraine, Indians come back home...to politics!

When 219 Indians touched down in Mumbai after a long and tedious journey that began from war-torn Ukraine, the only thing they wished for was to see their near and dear ones and hold them close. Instead, the first face they saw as soon as they landed was of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Union cabinet minister Piyush Goyal.

The first batch of Indians, mostly students and many of them young women, took off from the Henri Coanda International Airport in Bucharest, Romania earlier on Thursday and landed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport at around 8.30 p.m.

Before they could disembark from their Air India flight, however, Goyal boarded the aircraft and spent a good ten minutes talking to them about how Prime Minister Narendra Modi had spared no effort in bringing them home.

The words, “our honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji” were heard several times, before the passengers could finally get off the plane in which they had spent several hours fraught with worry.

The politicisation, however, did not end there. A little before the flight was scheduled to land, BJP as well as Nationalist Congress Party members gathered outside the T2 terminal of the Airport and started raising slogans, lauding their respective parties and party leaders, leading to crowding and confusion outside the already busy terminal.

The Sahar police had already imposed tight bandobast at the spot, and additional reinforcements were also kept on standby. Mumbai mayor Kishori Pednekar was also seen at the Airport, interacting with the staff as well as the returning Indians.

The students were visibly overjoyed and relieved as they exited the terminal to make their way home.

“There is a lot of fear everywhere in Ukraine. All the students from all countries are very scared. A lot of our fellow Indians are living in underground shelters right now and need to be rescued soon. I really hope that the government brings them back the way they brought us,” one of them, a female student of medicine who went to Ukraine in June last year, said.

Another student, a young man, added, “We were very worried when the bombs started dropping. We were asked to vacate our hostels as soon as possible. The Ukrainian government supported us a lot and so did the Indian government at their end as well.”

The airport authorities had blocked a special corridor for the arriving Indians, and also conducted mandatory temperature checks for everyone. Passengers were required to produce either a Covid-19 vaccination certificate or a negative RT-PCR test report in the absence of either document, they were to undergo an RT-PCR test at the airport the cost for which was borne by the airport authorities only those passengers who tested negative were allowed to leave.

DBI airport had also marked out a special area for the passengers to sit and provided them with Wi-Fi passwords, food and water bottles and any other assistance required.

As per data released by the Maharashtra government, around 1200 students from the state are still stuck in Ukraine and efforts are underway on part of the central government to bring them back as soon as possible.