Deepak Raheja and Shyamsundar Agarwal, Indian businessmen languishing in China, threatened to commit suicide if they were not brought to India safely within a week.
Alleging that Indian officials were not helping them in China, both of them went on a hungerstrike in Shanghai on Wednesday.
They sent a detailed mail to the ministry of external affairs, government of India, and copied it to the media, explaining their hardship and at the end of the mail they threatened that they will commit suicide if the government cannot bring them back to India within a week.
As the Indian embassy had stopped providing them financial aid two weeks ago and due the non-payment of the hotel’s outstanding bills, they were evicted from the hotel on Tuesday night. They had to sleep on the footpath in Shanghai.
Mr Raheja said that Union external affairs minister S.M. Krishna had promised all kinds of help when they met him in Shanghai on February 7, during his China visit, but surprisingly, the embassy officials even stopped the financial aid to them.
“Due to non-payment of the hotel bills, we were thrown out of the hotel on Tuesday night and we had to spend the whole night on the street. We are left with no money and we had no option but to resort to the hungerstrike,” said Mr Raheja.
“The embassy officials are not responding to our mail and we will commit suicide if the government will not take us from China within a week,” he threatened.
The two Indian businessmen, claiming to be employees of a trading firm in the Yiwu city of China, were rescued from the illegal custody of the local traders with the help of Indian officials on January 4 and were brought to Shanghai.
They were taken into custody last December.