FEATURE ARTICLE: Curry bashing? A Racist Australian Underbelly and the Education Industry

Nitin Garg had arrived in Australia from Jagraon, in the northern Indian state of Punjab, expecting a promising future. Three years later, as a permanent resident and with a postgraduate degree in Commerce he left for India in a body bag. By the time the next ‘breaking news’ occurs, his violent death will be forgotten. But for his mother, his 98 year old grandfather and his siblings, Nitin’s violent stabbing at West Footscray in Melbourne will be forever remembered with the tears of losing a loved one and the guilt for making the decision to send him to the West, which is assumed to be safer than India. Nitin and perhaps his whole family’s future relied on his endurance, even if dreadfully lonely, in an alien metropolis. The south-eastern state of Victoria, one of the most multicultural locations in the world, is where 21 year old Nitin died alone on 2 January 2010. Violent deaths and assaults like his stabbing, racially motivated or not, have consequences, not only in political terms but for personal lives.
Nitin’s death occurred during a month in which three other Indian taxi drivers were assaulted in Melbourne and Ballarat. From May last year, reports of violent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and then in Sydney appeared in newspapers the world over. The violence was particularly widely reported in India, inciting extremist anti-Australia responses that included the burning of effigies of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in New Delhi. Reacting to the aggression, Indian students organised peaceful protests in Melbourne and Sydney which themselves turned violent and ended with police intervention. Subsequently, there have been further protests in Melbourne and Sydney with Indian students coming out to raise awareness about safety issues, the rising crime rate and the unfair justice system in Australia.
A lot has been written so far on the subject, and rightly so. Understandably, the coverage has been extensive in the Indian media, which has framed the issue as one of deeply entrenched racism within the Australian society. Further, at a time when Australia and India’s strategic partnership is growing, the attacks have made the Australian Government extremely uncomfortable. India’s Foreign Minister, S. M. Krishna, has recently warned that if attacks on students continue, the Government may advise students not to travel to Australia. All the same, for Australia, this crisis in the education sector is not only about its ties with India and its own global image as a major education provider nation but its own uneasiness with the ‘R’ word.
Australia’s relationship with international students goes back over five decades to 1950, following the establishment of the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia in that year, an organisation fostering cooperation among the countries of South Asia and the Pacific. Today, education is a full-blown industry, and has moved ahead of tourism, Australia’s other main services export, in recent years. Indeed, the education industry in Australia is the third largest export earner behind coal and iron ore.
Students from various parts of Asia provide the bulk of the Australian education system’s financial backbone. There are now almost 100,000 students from India alone, contributing almost USD 2 billion to the economy. While the Indian market is still smaller than that of China, numbers have grown by 55 per cent, compared with a growth of 19 per cent from China. Students from the subcontinent accounted for 19 per cent of total international enrolments in 2009.
Imagined racism or an Inconvenient Truth?
Much as racial background and English speaking skills are crucial issues in the education industry, there are class issues within the South Asian community at large in Australia. Shortly after the student protests, taxi drivers of South Asian origin demonstrated in Melbourne for their security. Many of them felt unsafe driving taxis at night with increased incidences of attacks. While those demonstrations were widely reported in Australian media, the global media – including the Indian media – did not pay much serious attention to the predicament of taxi drivers. All the while, there was great focus on the plight of the students. This neatly ties into conventional notions of class struggles, as most Indian students are from relatively well-off families. While some South Asian taxi drivers are also students, recent attacks portrayed as only targeting the Indian student community created a different kind of anxiety about Australia. Both the press and the middle class in India were able to mobilise critical public opinion to pressure the Australian Government to respond to this.
Australian Indians also find these new debates about race relations uncomfortable. Over the years, many Indians who settled here have gone to extraordinary lengths to blend in and adopt an Australian colloquial style of speech if not a perfect ‘Aussie’ accent. Many of the second generation migrants are more comfortable in their Australian identity rather than their Indian skin colour. There is a deep divide between migrant South Asians/Indians and the student community. Many migrants now feel that their peace and comfort zone have been destroyed by the students and their protests. Inadequate support has been offered to the students from Indian social bodies in Australia. The President of the Federation of Indian Associations of Victoria, Vasan Srinivasan said, ‘Each and every time anything happens in the state of Victoria, they (Indian student leaders) immediately come up and say it’s a racist attack on Indian students’.

FEATURE ARTICLE: Curry bashing? A Racist Australian Underbelly and the Education Industry South Asia Masala

Australian minister admits 'curry-bashing' damaged image

New Delhi: Australian foreign minister Stephen Smith, in New Delhi to repair ties, admitted on Wednesday that the recent attacks on Indian students Down Under caused “considerable damage” to the country’s image, but assured his government had “zero tolerance” towards racism and “abhors violence”.


In the last couple of months, Canberra, which was initially in a

state of denial, has acknowledged that some, though not all, of these attacks may have been racist.
Australia is trying its best to grapple with the problem and has been able to convince New Delhi that though the attacks have not stopped, the issue was being taken up at the highest levels of government and a sincere attempt was being made to protect the over 1.2 lakh Indian students in that country.
Smith gave a talk at Delhi’s elite St Stephen’s College on Wednesday morning. He invited students to Australia for higher studies and claimed the country was safe. He said the Australian Institute of Criminology had been roped to study the attacks and come up with an “exhaustive report”.
“Studies done by our police gave us statistics, but they weren’t exhaustive. The Australian Institute of Criminology, which is a private body, is now assessing the situation to establish a better understanding of the attacks as well as see if the perception that Indian students are targeted is true,” Smith said, adding,
“These studies will give us a deeper understanding if we [government] are doing all we can to address the issue.”

Australian minister admits 'curry-bashing' damaged image - dnaindia.com

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.

INDIA-AUSTRALIA: 'Curry Bashing' in Oz Sours Bilateral Ties - IPS ipsnews.net

THE recent spate of bashings of Indian students in Melbourne is an appalling episode in this nation's history. It is a serious social, educational, diplomatic and probably economic crisis that no one is taking seriously enough. The performance of John Brumby's Victorian Government has been pathetic. It has stumbled from bland denial to belated symbolism, never acknowledging the gravity of the problem or its own culpability and not taking any serious action to confront it. The Rudd Government's response also has been belated, but there is a better sense in Canberra of the problem's dimensions.
It seems astonishing that you would have to argue with anybody that a big outbreak of racist violence in an Australian capital city is a first-order problem.
Last financial year nearly 1500 assaults and robberies were committed on people of Indian origin in Victoria, up by nearly one-third from the year before. But what has rightly gained international attention is the many assaults on Indian students.
Brumby and his Police Commissioner Simon Overland at first were inclined to deny the problem was racial at all. Eventually they came to admit that some attacks were racial, but still cling to the idiotic defence that most of the crimes are opportunistic, as if it's impossible to be opportunistic and racist.

Blind eye to racism | The Australian

It's a bit odd that the papers in India didn't report the Indian man who murdered his wife because she'd gone out without his permission in Sydney or the Indian bloke who was cheating his fellow Indians out of wages ion the Riverina ,so they killed him . Sensationalism is the name of the game for all countries newspapers radio shock jocks .