- As the Foreign Office advises Britons to get out of India
while they still can, a sense of utter panic has suddenly gripped the expatriate
community...
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- It has always been a popular haunt with Delhi's expatriates.
With its trendy espresso bar, music shop selling wide-screen televisions
and highbrow bookshop, Khan Market is the perfect place to relax on a Saturday
afternoon.
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- But yesterday the market was ghostly and deserted. The
diplomatic wives normally out hunting for luxury ice cream had vanished.
Instead, among the Britons and Americans still stranded in Delhi, there
was only one topic of conversation: when are you getting out?
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- It is no exaggeration to say that Jack Straw's less-than-subtle
hint on Friday afternoon that India stands on the brink of nuclear war
has provoked utter panic. Most foreigners have followed the escalating
crisis between India and Pakistan over the past three weeks with growing
anxiety. Few had anticipated that it would affect them directly. It has.
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- Yesterday, those left behind in India's Lutyens-designed
capital, with its wide boulevards and green neem trees, were desperately
dialling their travel agents. 'We were completely freaked out by Jack Straw's
remarks,' Barbara McKinlay, whose husband, Nick, works for the Aga Khan
Foundation in Delhi, said last night. 'Shortly afterwards, the BBC and
CNN disappeared from the telly. We went to the Foreign Office website,
which advised us to leave India.'
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- Yesterday, Mrs McKinlay was on Virgin Atlantic's lunchtime
flight back to Britain - and the comparative safety of Brighton - with
her two children, Christian, nine, and Amelia, seven. 'A nuclear war would
be so horrific for the world, never mind for our personal life here. I
hope it won't happen. Nick is leaving on Wednesday or Thursday,' she added.
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- The British High Commission in New Delhi announced yesterday
that all but 40 staff deemed essential were leaving. At an emergency meeting
on Friday evening, staff were told the situation was deeply serious and
they had no alternative but to leave. The Commission's Barrat-style suburban
bungalows were alive yesterday with the sound of middle-class packing and
of luggage being dumped into the boots of gleaming diplomatic Land Rovers.
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- More than 200 staff and family members have been told
to get out by Wednesday. They are leaving on commercial flights. Officials
are keen to stress that their departure does not amount to an 'evacuation'
- but it adds up to the same thing. Those staying behind are pondering
what to do next - and how to run away from a nuclear explosion.
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- 'I thought I might sod off to Bangalore [in southern
India],' Simon Mackay, who works for an engineering company in Delhi, said
as he dropped his wife, Ashleigh, and children, Holly, nine, and Harry,
six, at Delhi's international airport. They are flying home to Sudbury
in Suffolk. 'If commercial flights stop and things get scary, I guess I'll
jump on a train or drive out of the city,' he added optimistically.
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- Other expatriates are booking tickets to Calcutta - too
far away for Pakistan to hit, probably - and distant Sri Lanka. Nobody
is under any illusions that, in the event of a nuclear confrontation between
India and Pakistan, Delhi is likely to be the first place that Pakistan's
ruler General Musharraf will choose to attack. It would take between three
and five minutes for a nuclear missile fired from Pakistan to land on the
Indian capital.
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- The first most residents would know about it would be
a glaring white flash, by which time it would be too late. It is this horrific
scenario that is prompting almost all major India-based organisations to
get their foreign workers out now.
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- The UN announced yesterday that it was pulling all its
non-essential staff, and dependants, out of Pakistan and India. The International
Committee for the Red Cross is doing the same thing. A large number of
expatriates working for British Gas in Delhi are leaving, too. So are several
foreign missionaries who are relocating to southern India.
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- Even the chairman of governors at Delhi's friendly British
School sent round an email late on Friday night announcing his sudden departure.
'As you may have heard, the British High Commission here advised all Brits
to think seriously of pulling out. We've thunk, and are on our way home,'
it read.
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- On Friday, in a move carefully co-ordinated with London,
the US State Department urged the 60,000 Americans living in India to leave
and said its non-essential diplomatic staff would also be pulling out.
Yesterday, France also joined a long list of countries that have advised
their nationals to leave. Others include Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
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- Leah Wright, the American manager of a Delhi-based call
centre, held an emergency meeting with her 10 US staff. They discovered
they had two Amex cards between them. With them, they bought 'very expensive'
tickets out of India on yesterday's Virgin flight to London. 'We got home
at 3am and packed up all our things. This took until 6am. I had a shower
and set off for the airport. We had no sleep at all.'
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- 'We don't think the situation is life-threatening, but
we want to get out while we can,' she said. Last night, Wright was on her
way home to Salt Lake City in Utah - and safety.
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- India's Foreign Secretary, Jaswant Singh, has expressed
surprise at the exodus. And on Friday, at a security conference in Singapore,
the Defence Secretary, George Fernandes, insisted that the situation on
the border with Pakistan remained 'stable', despite the fact that a million
men have been eyeball to eyeball there since January.
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- And yet there are subtle signs that India is already
beginning to prepare its vast population for the coming war. The normally
reliable Star news channel carried a report yesterday claiming that 2,000-3,000
al-Qaeda fighters were now gathering in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and
preparing to attack India.
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- Already, fact is beginning to blur into propaganda. India's
newspapers made a stab yesterday at normality and carried front-page photos
of France's World Cup defeat by Senegal, and the hapless goalkeeper Fabien
Barthez fumbling the ball.
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- But there is a growing sense among India's political
establishment and its savvy middle class that it is no longer a question
of whether India and Pakistan will go to war, but when. Many expatriates
leave India in June because of the extreme heat - and the imminent monsoon,
which transforms Delhi's roads into grid-locked canals. But this time those
leaving are starting to realise they may never come back.
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- >http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,726495,00.html
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