On 18 July, Suhana Nongrum, a third-year MBBS student from Shillong, found herself in a desperate situation. Studying in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Nongrum and a group of fellow Indian students had to make a hasty decision to leave their hostel, joining the exodus of scholars who had fled the day before. In a minute-long phone call to her father, Nongrum asked him to wait at the border in the wee hours of the morning. The drive to the border, usually a brisk 40 minutes, stretched into a tense hour. Police roadblocks added to the anxiety as officers stopped the students near the campus, questioning their decision to leave. “They wouldn’t let us go until we said we were leaving at our own risk,” Nongrum recalls. “There was no help from them; they were just following procedure.” Nongrum and her friends had to wait for about three hours at the border, till the authorities opened it. The student-led protests and subsequent violence that erupted in Bangladesh in July left thousands of Indian nationals stranded, half of them …