Friday, June 05, 2009

Racial Issues: Australia's "curry bashing" shame

By Ranjit Devraj - IPS
Republished permission Inter Press Service (IPS )copyright Inter Press Service (IPS)
www.ipsnewsasia.net and www.ipsnews.net

NEW DELHI (IPS) - A series of bloody attacks on Indian students in Australia, that many are convinced have racial undertones, threaten to undermine efforts to build relations between the two Asia Pacific countries.

Media reports speak of over 70 incidents in Melbourne alone over the past year, including four in the past fortnight, that have drawn outrage and demands for action by officials and the media here.

"It's difficult to put down the attacks on Indian students in Australia as stray incidents any longer," the respected Times of India newspaper said in an editorial on Monday. "Instances of Indian students being assaulted there often grievously have been one too many recently.

''What's worrisome is the fact that there appears to be racist undertones to these incidents. They are apparently part of a new fad -'curry bashing' - a term used to describe the act of assaulting Indian students with an intention to rob,'' the Times editorial said.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised the issue when his Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd called him on the telephone Friday to congratulate him on his winning a second term in India's general elections, which concluded in mid-May. ''The overwhelming majority of Indian students were safe" in Australia, Rudd said, according to a statement from the prime minister's office

"I said to Prime Minister Singh the more than 90,000 Indian students in Australia are welcome guests in our country...and the more than 200,000 Australians of Indian descent are welcome members of the Australian family," Rudd later told the Australian parliament. "The Australian government is committed to developing a stronger, closer relationship with India…''

At stake is the two billion U.S. dollars that Australia's education sector earns annually from Indian students, according to Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Last year the sector generated 15.5 billion dollars from 430,000 international students, of whom 96,739 were Indians.

In fact India's external affairs ministry said in a statement that Australia's high commissioner in New Delhi, John McCarthy, had been told that the "continuing sense of unease and insecurity among Indian students in Australia can have an adverse effect, in a sector that holds much promise."

On Saturday, prompted by prominently displayed newspaper reports of the stabbing of Sravan Kumar Theerthala, an Indian student in Melbourne, external affairs spokesman Vishnu Prakash said: "We are very closely monitoring the situation. We are quite concerned at the brutal attacks that are taking place."

The assault on Theerthala seems to have released long-suppressed anger in India at increasing incidents of racist violence that targets Indian students, which led popular movie star Amitabh Bachchan to turn down an honorary doctorate from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

''Under the prevailing circumstances I find it inappropriate at this juncture to accept this decoration," Bachchan said in a letter to QUT posted on his blog. "My conscience is profoundly unsettled at the moment.''

Bachchan made the decision after he asked his fans over his blog whether or not to accept the degree and said he was overwhelmed by answers in the negative.

Indian students who return home after completing their courses in Australia say that there is a general fear of being assaulted in places like Melbourne, whether racially motivated or not. In addition, some also complain of subtle racism at work.

''I could have stayed on in Australia after completing my degree in business management, but I was unsure of my future there as a foreigner,'' Saurabh Anand, who works for a television company, told IPS.

Anand pointed to the controversial comments on Australian racism made by management guru Sol Trujillo, who returned to his native United States after a successful stint as chief of 'Telstra', the Australian telecom giant.

In an interview with BBC, Trujillo said the four years he spent in Australia were like ''stepping back in time'' because of the racist attitudes. "It does exist and it's got to change because the world is full of a lot of people and most economies have to take advantage - including Australia - of a diverse set of people.''

In the BBC interview, Trujillo suggested that Rudd himself was racist because the prime minister was reported to have reacted to news of his departure from Australia by saying ''adios'', taking a jab at Trujillo's Hispanic origins.

Anand said he believed that racialism was involved in the arrest of Mohamed Haneef, an Indian doctor who was wrongly charged by the Australian government over a 2007 plot to set off bombs in London and Glasgow. Haneef was mistakenly arrested, detained and charged and an official report found Australian authorities had ignored evidence to arrest him.

Haneef, who now works in the Middle East, had his visa revoked by Australian authorities even though the case against him collapsed.
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