The Bengal BJP's attempts to reach out to students of the state who are out of Ukraine, or the kin of those stuck in the conflict zone — as part of a nationwide campaign to glorify the Centre’s Operation Ganga — seem to have backfired.

Affected students and the BJP’s political rivals have accused the Narendra Modi government of not doing enough for Indians in Ukraine.

“There is no assistance on the ground level. We were on our own risking our lives in the middle of a full-scale war,” said Ankan Hensh, a medical student from Howrah, who was stuck in Ukraine's Vinnytsia and managed to reach Romania on February 28 after battling immense difficulties.

Ankan, speaking from Romania, reacted cynically to reports of BJP leaders getting in touch with students or families waiting for youngsters to return.

“I don't think this is anything but a PR exercise," Ankan said.

“What the government is doing is not extradition. We were pretty much on our own. It is just providing us support to fly back to India,” added Sayan Pan, another student from Howrah, who has also been staying at a shelter in Romania for the last three days.

Amid nationwide concerns about Indian students stuck in Ukraine, the BJP decided to launch this outreach programme across India. Under this exercise, the Bengal unit of the party began collecting names of 364 students who have returned from Ukraine, or the details of family members of those still stuck in Ukraine or its neighbouring countries.

In Bengal, the onus of the outreach was given to state vice-president Madhuchhanda Kar.

“These are trying times and the party wants to stand beside the families of the stranded students,” Kar said.

Asked what the BJP state unit had done till now, she spoke about a helpline number and a call centre to remain in constant touch with the families.

The list of names has been shared with party MPs and MLAs, who will visit these families personally, she said.

“We have also sent out the list to our district presidents so that they can reach out to the families under their jurisdiction,” Kar added.

On Friday, MP Locket Chatterjee is likely to meet several students who are back from Ukraine at their homes in Hooghly.

Kar also added that in several cases her team has had to deal with the anger of the parents, who alleged inaction on the part of the Union government.

Insiders in the BJP said this outreach had been launched with the hope that reaching out to the families in this hour of crisis would help drum up support for Operation Ganga, which the Narendra Modi government launched on February 27 to evacuate students from Ukraine.

As part of the exercise, the government sent four Union ministers — Jyotiraditya Scindia, Kiren Rijiju, Hardeep Singh Puri and V.K. Singh — to the countries near Ukraine to coordinate with the local authorities and provide the assistance required for evacuation.

The Indian Air Force and multiple private airlines are providing logistic support to it.

Though the BJP tried to project its programme as humanitarian, its rivals attacked it as politically motivated.

Congress’s leader in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said the government was in election mode and not evacuation mode.

“During the pandemic, people were asked to beat utensils. Now during the Ukraine crisis the BJP has come up with another nautanki,” Chowdhury said. He added that the government should have taken preemptive measures to evacuate students and other Indians staying in Ukraine. “The government has failed in its foreign policies.”

Trinamul MLA Partha Bhowmick said the BJP's approach is political, while the Trinamul is in touch with such families on humanitarian grounds.

“I met two such families in Naihati and Bijpur, collected details of the students and shared them with Mamata Banerjee’s office so that their extradition can be expedited,” he said.

CPM leader Sujan Chakraborty said that the BJP must quit publicising Narendra Modi and urged the Centre to evacuate the students safely and quickly.