Muhammad Haroon has run out of food but is afraid to step out of his hostel at Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, to shop.

“None of us feel safe,” the research student from Afghanistan told The Telegraph over the phone on Monday evening, two days after a mob of 200 attacked the International Students Boys Hostel while some of the boarders were offering namaz.

During a 40-minute ordeal, students were chased across the hostel corridors and beaten, and one of them was allegedly stabbed. Haroon, a leg gashed by a glass shard, was thinking of “jumping off the second-floor balcony” to escape the marauders when the police arrived.

The 80 boarders at the hostel are required to get their own food. Haroon said that like many others, he ran out of food stocks on Monday. Some who still had food shared it with others.

“We have no food but we are too scared to go to the market,” he said.

News of the attack has left foreign students nervous elsewhere in India, too, said an Afghan student of PhD at Delhi University who didn’t want to be identified.

“The government has launched the ‘Study in India’ programme to attract foreign students. The least the students expect is safety. I hope the government takes up security issues seriously,” the student said.

Police investigate the Gujarat University hostel campus where students hailing from different foreign countries were assaulted allegedly by a group of persons over the issue of offering Namaz. PTI picture

Haroon, a second-year PhD student of international relations, said Gujarat University had allocated space on the hostel grounds for Muslim boarders to offer namaz.

About a dozen students were offering namaz on Saturday evening when some students of the university, accompanied by outsiders, barged into the hostel and began shouting “Jai Shri Ram”, Haroon said.

“They used abusive words but we continued our prayers silently. More people came with bats, sticks and stones. As they grew in number, they started throwing stones,” he said.

“A stone hit my chest. We ran into the rooms but they chased us. They attacked Christian students who were sleeping. We ran for our lives.”

Haroon cut his leg on a broken piece of window glass. He said Azat, a student from Turkmenistan, was stabbed between the ribs. Azat was discharged from hospital on Monday, and the police have registered an FIR, Haroon said.

Mario Fernando, a student from Sri Lanka, was woken up from sleep and beaten, Haroon alleged.

“We normally offer namaz in our rooms but because it’s the month of Ramadan, we were doing so at the designated place on the hostel grounds,” he said. “I wish we had been warned, we would then not have offered namaz there.”

Haroon said he and some others had locked themselves inside a second-floor room but the attackers broke the door open. He and a few other foreign students then ran onto the balcony and were thinking of jumping when the police arrived, he said.

Vice-chancellor Neerja A. Gupta and police officers entered the hostel and assured the foreign students about their security, Haroon said.

CPM student arm SFI has condemned the assault.

“It is deeply disturbing to learn that foreign students at Gujarat University were viciously attacked by a communal mob while observing namaz…. This incident marks yet another egregious deterioration of the academic and pluralistic environment within campuses under the Modi regime, raising serious concerns about student safety,” it said.

“This attack has marred India’s internationally recognised principles of tolerance, pluralism, and fraternity. The BJP governments, both at the Centre and state levels, must be held accountable for this national disgrace.”