The US State Department on Thursday (local time) said the recent spate of attacks on Indian students in the US is “unacceptable” and said the administration under US President Joe Biden is working hard to ‘thwart and disrupt’ these incidents.
“There’s no excuse for violence, certainly based on — on race or — or gender or religion or any other factor. That’s just unacceptable here in the United States,” White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby said.
“The President and this administration has been working very, very hard to make sure we’re doing everything we can to work with state and local authorities to try to thwart and disrupt those kinds of attacks and make it clear to anybody who might consider them that they’ll be held properly accountable,” Kirby further added.
Back-to-back deaths of Indian students at colleges across the US has shook the Indian-American community as well as citizens back home and concerned fellow students studying there as well.
Seven students of both Indian and Indian-American origin have died in 2024 alone. All of them who died were men and are 25 years old and under.
Two of them died by suicide, two died due to alleged overdose, two were found dead after they went missing and one was beaten to death. All of these deaths were reported from several states ranging from Connecticut to Indiana.
Indians constitute more than 25% of all international students in the US.
Virag Shah, 21, a junior at Purdue University in Indiana, who is also president of the school’s Indian Students Association, said fellow Indian students are spooked by the recent news of deaths of Indian and Indian-origin students.
“It felt like a pattern, like, why was it another Indian kid?” Shah said, while speaking to news agency NBC.
Between January 15th and February 5th, a string of tragic deaths involving young Indian men has rattled the diaspora across the US as well parents back home.
It began with the discovery of the bodies of Dinesh Gattu, 22, and Sai Rakoti, 21, in their Hartford, Connecticut, residence due to alleged accidental fentanyl overdoses.
It was followed by the death of 25-year-old Vivek Saini in Lithonia, Georgia, at the convenience store where he worked part-time on January 16th.
This was followed by the discovery of 18-year-old Akul Dhawan’s body on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus on January 20th.
More recently, on January 28th, the body of 19-year-old Neel Acharya was recovered on Purdue’s campus after a night out, and on February 5th, Purdue graduate student Sameer Kamath, 23, was found deceased in nearby woods from an apparent suicide.
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