Indian Students Seek Justice in Vain

Hetq Online
[April 21, 2006]

I happened upon a huge crowd of Indian students walking up the
Baghramyan Street. I thought it was one of their national holidays; they
are always accompanied by processions and music. Well, I thought, the
procession would be a great part of a new project, Indians in Armenia,
that Hetq photographer Onnik Krikorian and I have launched recently.

But as soon as I approached, it became clear that the crowd gathering at
the National Assembly building was not celebrating a festival at all; it
looked more like a demonstration.

`What’s the gathering about?’ I asked one of the students, expecting to
hear some common Armenian university problem.

His answer was beyond all my expectations. It was something horrible.
Later in the several hours that I spent with them at the National
Assembly others added their stories to his tale, and gradually the whole
picture emerged.

Today (April 20, 2006) at around 13:00 pm, a third year student at the
Medical University, 21- year-old Prashant Anchalia fell out of a sixth
floor window in Building #7 of the Zeytun Student Dormitory. How and why
he fell are not yet clear. The students who rushed to him found him
lying on the ground covered with blood, screaming in pain. They called
an ambulance and their dean’s office.

Dean Anna Sarkisyan arrived fifteen minutes later. Although she is a
doctor, she made no attempt to provide emergency aid to the student, and
even forbade the other students to touch him or take him to hospital in
a taxi, rather than wait for the ambulance, which was slow to arrive.
Instead, she ordered them to wait for the police to get there.

The Police arrived and took some witnesses to the Kanaker Police Station
for questioning.

The ambulance arrived some 45-50 minutes after the call. According to
the students, it was in very poor condition and had no medical
equipment, not even an oxygen mask.

On the way to the hospital, Prashant Anchalia died.

The students went to the Medical University and asked to meet with the
rector, seeking an explanation for why their friend had been treated so
negligently. The response of the newly- appointed rector, Gohar Kialyan,
came as a shock. Out of the blue, she referred to Indian girls as
prostitutes, and showed the students the middle fingers of both her
hands, a gesture whose meaning is well known to even five-year old
kids.

Astonished by her behavior, the students decided to seek help in higher
places.

Several hundred students marched to the National Assembly, shouting,
`Help, President!’ and `We Want Justice!’ They were immediately
surrounded by the police, who forbade the students to move to the
Presidential Palace, faces frozen in dumb indifference.

`Man, I was supposed to go get my tooth fixed today,’ one of them
yawned, as he glanced significantly at the pavement. All the police
cared about was not letting the people cross the line between the
pavement and the street. I tried to find compassion in anybody’s eyes,
but in vain.

`What you want exactly? Tell me,’ said a policeman, apparently of some
high rank, not even bothering to wipe the ironical expression off his
face.

`We demand that the rector resign.’

`Justice.’

`Let them act like human beings, not like nationalists.’

`If it had been an Armenian lying there, would he have been treated the
same way?’

I heard it from all sides. They would ask and answer this question a
hundred times within several hours, to the politicians who appeared from
time to time, to the journalists, among whom there was no one from the
National TV.

`We will stay here until we get the rector’s resignation. We will
boycott our classes; we will go back to our country. Let her at least be
worried about losing the money she makes from 800 Indian students,’ the
Indian students said.

An elderly passer-by read their posters, which said in Armenian, `We do
not need her apology, we need justice!’ `Shame on the rector!’ `The
rector must resign!’ Learning the story behind them, she said, `My
dears, what you are doing makes no sense. She won’t go’don’t you know
who her husband is?’

A young man shrugged his shoulders and said, `Guys, this kind of thing
happens all the time. You’re not going to accomplish anything.’

The students formed a group of four representatives and sent them to the
National Assembly to meet with the vice-speaker, Tigran Torosyan.

Some time later, the vice-rector of the Medical University, Victor
Sahakyan, and the second secretary of the Indian Embassy arrived.

`Let them come to the University and speak there. We don’t solve our
problems on the street,’ he said.

Told that they had already been to the university, where they had been
insulted by the rector, Sahakyan explained, `They aren’t representing it
to you correctly. They did not interpret it the right way.’ He was
immediately interrupted by the Indians, who wanted to know how else the
gesture could be interpreted.

Earlier a policeman had told the students, `Guys, don’t worry about it.
She’s a woman. Maybe she didn’t know the meaning of the gesture.’

The Embassy representative, Mr. Bali, advised the students to disperse
and let them settle the matter the diplomatic way.

The Embassy told the parents of the dead boy that he had committed
suicide, without even waiting for the investigation to be concluded.

The students do not believe it was suicide.

`He was a balanced person. He had many plans for the future. He could
not have killed himself,’ they said.

The four-person delegation came back from the meeting with Tigran
Torosyan and said that Torosyan had asked them for two days to get
acquainted with the matter and decide what to do.

After that, Torosyan met with the Indian ambassador, Rina Pandei.

Ara Avetisyan, the deputy minister of Science and Education came to meet
the Indian students. In his view, the National Assembly was not the
right place for a protest, and oral demands were not the best method. He
advised the students to produce their demands in written form. The most
ridiculous thing was that no one could tell them who to write to.

And everybody kept saying that the students had to go back to the
university to speak to the rector and get her apology if she had done
something wrong. Completely ignoring the fact that that was not what the
students were after.

Red berets appeared at the building of the Parliament, surrounding the
crowd that was already surrounded by the police. As if the Indian
students there were dangerous criminals.

A man in civilian clothes standing with the police looked at the crowd
with frank surprise and asked, `There are more than a billion of them
now, right? What they are fighting for, one more, one less?’

The one cause for optimism in the whole situation was that there were
also few compassionate Armenians there ` two young girls, two students
from YSU who were with the Indians all that time and an old woman who,
when she heard story, knelt down to the Indian girls, hugged them, and
began to cry.

Some students brought lighted candles with them. During these hours I
managed to talk to most of them. The students would come up to me and
ask if I was tired, if I needed anything to eat.

`Look at this girl standing with the Chechen separatist,’ muttered a
young Policeman. The man I was talking to, the `Chechen separatist’, was
a Sikh who while living here had to remove his turban and cut his beard
(Sikhism does not allow to cut hair and shave off their beard), because
the core of Armenian society, the ` rabiz mass’ or `real Armenian guys’
as they prefer to be called, do not tolerate any other haircut but their
own crop, no style of dress but their black trousers and shirts. The
Indian students have problems with these Armenian guys all the time.

At around 10 o’clock in the evening the Ambassador, accompanied by
Tigran Torosyan, came out of the parliament building and took the
students to the Medical University. There, they had a private meeting
with Rector Gohar Kialyan. Off course the meeting yielded no results.

`She said she was sorry,’ one of the students said. `She said it without
any expression, any feeling. Then she suggested we arrange a delegation
to meet our dean and talk¦’

Friday morning the Indian students went to the First Hospital to pay
their respects to their friend. Iranian, Syrian and other foreign
students joined them. No Armenians were there.

Hasmik Hovhannisian
Photos by Onnik Krikorian