By Pat Tarantino
By the morning of Nov. 29, 2008, news reports had painted Mumbai, India as a war zone. The streets of India’s financial capital were littered with blood, smoke and debris as wounded civilians were rushed to hospitals. Those left standing struggled to piece together a sense of normalcy shattered by three days of gunfire and explosions.
Meanwhile, at Northeastern, where vigils moved through the streets, administrators in a risk-assessment committee decided the fate of the school’s fledgling Global PACT India Dialogue program, in which some 20 students and faculty were to go to the small village of Hubli this semester. Hubli is located in the southern state of Karnataka, about 1,276 miles from Mumbai.
After considerable deliberation, the late-February departure was postponed for six months while the security situation in India was reevaluated.
The attacks in Mumbai began Nov. 26 with the arrival of 10 heavily armed gunmen by sea. By the 29th, more than 130 Indian civilians and security personnel, as well as 30 foreign nationals, were dead.
The program was the product of a combined effort from the human services and international affairs departments to provide students with an opportunity to study and assist in community development programs overseas. With the help of the Deshpande Foundation, a leading philanthropic organization headquartered near Boston that works to promote innovations and entrepreneurship in part of Karnataka, students would work to improve the quality of life for Hubli’s citizens by drawing on the education and training provided by the university, said Lori Gardinier, one of the dialogue’s co-leaders.
After completing an extensive orientation and training program in the United States, covering cultural norms and safety concerns in January and February, students were supposed to depart to Bangalore before traveling to Hubli, where they would begin a three-week training program followed by three-week internships at local Non-Governmental organizations, or NGOs, to improve living conditions for Hubli’s 13,000 citizens.
While some students say that postponing the trip was the right choice, students like sophomore finance major Ruchi Chheda said she was not yet ready to disregard her original plans.
“I just really wanted to go. I convinced all of my advisors and changed my whole co-op schedule in order to make it,” Chheda said.
The attacks struck particularly close to home for Chheda, whose mother and father were in Mumbai at the time of the attacks for a relative’s wedding. Although she says her family lost several friends during the attacks, she said the wedding still happened as planned.
“I knew life wouldn’t stop,” she said.
Based on conversations with her parents, Chheda expressed confidence in India’s security, saying that it had increased considerably.
“Thanks to the attacks, the government has really woken up,” she said, citing the six security checkpoints her family encountered on their way through the airport.
Although the presence of security forces has increased in highly populated areas, the slow response and poorly led operations to end the November attacks has done little to reassure some potential visitors.
Images of India’s elite National Security Guards blindly firing automatic weapons into hostage-filled rooms, and reports that the Indian government’s bureaucracy prevented soldiers from leaving their barracks without proper consent, have created serious doubt in some students’ minds.
Valerie Gurzenda, a middler international affairs major and veteran of six alternative spring break trips, including a trip to post-Katrina New Orleans put it bluntly: “I don’t think six months is enough time for the Indian government to get its act together,” she said.
Upon hearing of the attacks, Gurzenda withdrew from the trip entirely.
Gardinier strongly supported postponing the trip, and said that “with the emergence of these programs, there’s been an increased need for universities to pay attention to the risks found in less developed countries.”
While Gardinier said India was still a relatively safe destination for traveling individuals, moving a large group of westerners through the crowded city of Bangalore en route to Hubli was an unnecessary risk if the trip was to take place as planned.
Gardinier added that terrorism is not a new phenomenon in India. Due to several long-standing, low intensity conflicts along and within its borders, the country has faced terror campaigns led by small Maoist groups within the country.
The November attacks are of particular concern to the university since almost one in every five victims was a foreign national.
“Bombings happen in India, we know that. But this was an attack specifically targeting westerners. The university is right to be concerned,” Gardinier said.
The final decision to postpone the trip was issued by a small committee of administrators from the international affairs office, who were charged with assessing the risks of locations for international study. One of the committee’s leaders, Vice Provost Robert Lowndes, said the unanimous vote to push back the dialogue was a difficult one.
“I’m extremely sorry because I’m a strong proponent of extending our study abroad programs, but safety is the primary component for our students going on any international program,” Lowndes said.
The move to postpone the program was primarily influenced by notifications issued by the State Department. These warnings take two forms, travel warnings and travel alerts.
Travel warnings are issued to Americans if a country is deemed somewhat dangerous and encourage travelers to take particular caution when moving through high-risk areas. In the event of a travel warning, Lowndes said, the university travel ban can be appealed if students and faculty acknowledge the risk and provide the committee with evidence that they have taken all necessary precautions to ensure the safest possible trip.
Meanwhile, travel alerts are only issued in the events of an “acute risk” to travelers. An alert was issued soon after the Mumbai attacks and will stay in effect for several months prior to reevaluation, making an appeal near impossible, Lowndes said.
Lowndes noted that beyond terrorism, the “ongoing potential of hostilities between India and Pakistan “have created an extremely volatile scenario as increasingly apparent links between the Mumbai assault and Pakistani intelligence agents and the Pakistani state-assisted Lashkar-e-Toiba group have come to light.
“We want the focus of the program to be on the academic aspects, not on incidents like these,” Lowndes said.
