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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’.
Indian media advocacy has played a critical role in terming
recent events a crisis in race relations. Although dubbed
hysterical behaviour by the Australian media and political leaders,
the Indian media has a point, which I return to later. However, it
is also a concern that as a nation with a long colonial history,
the Indian media plays the race card in sensationalist reports. The
cartoon depicting the Victorian Police as KKK members in the Mail
Today is an example of this.
This recent debate re-produces an ‘imagined’ and ‘racist’ nation
that has sportsmen (especially cricketers) who do not hesitate to
deploy racist slurs against the opponents. Racism is not only a
Western (read White/Caucasian) phenomenon. South Asians have played
their own part in constructing racist beliefs and practices. After
all, the Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh episode only occurred
in recent history. Indian off spinner Harbhajan Singh had
been banned for three Tests after the International Cricket Council
ruled that he racially abused Australia’s Andrew Symonds during the
Test match at the Sydney Cricket Ground in early 2008. While the
Board of Control for Cricket in India, the financial superpower of
the game, was able to turn the decision to Singh’s favour after he
called Symonds a monkey, this incident highlights ‘reverse’ racism
of Indians/South Asians against Australians.
Beyond the race issue, the Indian media’s cringe when portrayed
in the international sphere as a poverty-stricken nation (for
example, Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger or last year’s
film Slumdog Millionaire were criticised for depicting
India negatively) but not as the global power as Nehru projected
articulates a paradox in Indian identity. Poverty, caste
issues, gender violence, and the exclusion of minorities are only a
few concerns that may be discussed only in the domestic and private
space but not the international and public space. Political leaders
and a significant section of the Indian media and entertainment
industry manifest in their work a highly nationalistic, great power
image of India.
Australia on the other hand, has a long and uncomfortable
history of racial politics in a colonial and neo-colonial
asymmetrical pattern with its own indigenous population. During the
Liberal Government’s rule under John Howard, Australia’s position
vis-à-vis the refugees (e.g. the ‘Tampa crisis’ and the ‘boat
people’ crises) highlighted Australia’s deeply entrenched racial
anxieties. These anxieties about the ‘other’ intensified with the
‘global war on terror’, and resulted in incidents such as the
Mohammed Haneef episode. Under the Labor regime of Kevin Rudd,
Australia is in negotiation with Indonesia to build a detention
centre which will process asylum applications of the new ‘boat
people’, Tamils from Sri Lanka.
The assaults on Indian/South Asian students bring forth this
racial tension. As such, the sporadic nature of at least some of
the attacks was ignored and a pattern of hate crimes or racist
attacks on Indian students in Australia was drawn. In turn, this
was directly linked to the ultimate pressure point – money. The
students contribute to the Australian economy not only by working
in the country but also bringing financial resources from home.
It is clear that in different times different racial/ethnic
groups are targeted. After September 11, people from the Arab world
reported abuse and assaults. In recent years, there have been
reports of the murder of a number of Chinese and Vietnamese
students. These have not been investigated as hate crimes, but
rather as violent acts with other, non-racial motives. However, the
sheer number of Indians/South Asians being assaulted means race is
at least one of the factors that contribute to these events. The
incidents themselves were said to have been taking place for
months, with 1449 people of South Asian origin reportedly having
been assaulted in Victoria, where Melbourne is located, between
2007 and 2008. The Victorian Police stated that this number
increased by 5.4 per cent in 2009, to 1525. In the 2006-7 financial
year there were 1082 attacks on Indians/South Asians in Victoria
alone. These individuals were victims of crimes such as robberies
and assault, about 50 per cent of which occured in workplace. The
assault rate for Indians in Victoria was about 1700 in every
100,000, against 700 in every 100,000 for non-Indians.
The important fact to note is that it is not only Indian
students who are being targeted, but also other South Asian/brown
students, particularly men. There is no clear-cut distinction in
statistics about this simple fact. All South Asians are often
counted as people of Indian origin. Gender is, in fact, an issue
because a significantly higher number of male students are involved
in shift work, and are therefore more vulnerable. By portraying the
violence as racial attacks only against Indian students, the
already marginalised students from other South Asian states have
been doubly marginalised and silenced.
South Asian students in the media have stated how they have
encountered racist slurs and aggressive behaviour in public spaces.
Gautam Gupta from the Federation of Indian Students, Australia
notes that ‘Bloody Indian, go back home’ is a commonly used insult
during many of the attacks. Both public debates and private
discussions with Indian and other communities in Australia suggest
that a majority of them perceive that the racist attacks have a
criminal and opportunistic pattern (for example robberies) as well.
The Victorian and New South Wales (NSW) Police have downplayed the
race factor and stated that the attacks do not highlight a culture
of ‘curry-bashing’ but rather are criminal offences against a
vulnerable population. The Victorian Police Commissioner expresses
this vulnerability in terms of a ‘soft target’, an identification
that is problematic as the vulnerability is produced and reinforced
because of racial and economic anxieties.
The race issue is finally being discussed, though in small doses
and only by a few. Former Defence Force Chief Peter Cosgrove, who
lived in India for a year, told ABC Radio that Australians were
‘disinclined to downplay, much less dismiss, the potential racist
elements in what is becoming a litany of criminality’.
Indians/South Asians are disproportionately targeted
according to a reluctant admission made by Simon Overland, the
Chief Commissioner of Police in Victoria on 20 January 2010. He
stated that Indians are over-represented in robbery statistics and
there is a racist element to some attacks.
The debate about race is threatening to open a Pandora’s box
that would highlight the dire situation of international students
in general, many of whom are treated disrespectfully in their own
environments (including their educational institutions in some
cases) and in other communities. Melbourne University Professor of
Higher Education Simon Marginson stated, ‘Racist targeting is
involved. Indian students do have a special problem. And there
isn’t enough official and civil concern about international student
security in Australia.’ He also called for a cross-border agency to
oversee the security of international students. The outgoing
Aboriginal Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma also stated that
some government policies are directly racist.
The insecurity of living as a foreign student with a temporary
visa, always subject to the suspicion of work permit violation by
the authorities, is part of a hard everyday truth for many students
of South Asian origin. Monash University demographer Bob Birell
suggests that sheer numbers have pushed Indian students out of
inner-city haunts into the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.
However, on some occasions, South Asian/Indian students are not
preferred tenants. It is, of course, true that many live farther
away from the city centres to take advantage of cheaper
rents. Indian, Nepali, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan
students also stated to this author that it was difficult to find
housing close to their educational institution or work places in
big cities. Whatever the push, South Asian students are forced to
live in unsafe neighbourhoods. Some of these neighbourhoods have
rampant criminal gang activities. Many work late night and/or early
morning shifts, and spend a substantial amount of time using public
transport, making them vulnerable to attacks in empty train
stations or streets.
The Australian Police has limited information about the
assailants which suggests that they are overwhelmingly teenagers,
not exclusively Caucasians, and also include non-European
juveniles. There are two critical issues underlined here. First,
Indian students in Sydney alleged last June that some Lebanese
youths were behind racially motivated attacks. The Australian
authorities are also struggling to integrate new waves of
immigrants. The NSW Police refused to admit that race was a factor
here. Police Superintendent of the Parramatta Local Command,
Robert Redfern, stated, ‘The victims of crime that do occur in this
area are not exclusively Indian, the perpetrators of those crimes
are not exclusively Middle Eastern’. However, the reasons behind
these particular attacks could be more complex. Some areas in
NSW, where Sydney is located, were traditionally dominated by West
Asians but are now South Asian hubs. This has altered the
demographics of these suburbs, making curry houses and falafel
eateries neighbours in these multi-ethnic locations. While West
Asia and South Asia have strong cultural, historical, social and
political connections, as migrants from these regions in a foreign
land, the battle is constructed and manifested as ‘Lebanese’
against ‘Indians’, and vice versa. During a time of economic
hardship and unemployment, especially for young people who are
mostly contract/shift workers, race may not be the primary
motivation but frustration is targeted in a racial manner at people
perceived as the unwanted ‘other’. This issue must be addressed
frankly in various multi-cultural forums in Australia.
Second, the Cronulla riots generated international headlines in
2005. On 4 December of that year, a group of volunteer surf life
savers were assaulted in a week that had seen several other violent
assaults. On 11 December, approximately 5,000 people converged at
the Cronulla beach to protest these events. The alcohol-fuelled
white mob hunted and attacked anyone who looked Middle Eastern,
which triggered retaliatory riots by young men of Middle Eastern
descent. The riots and the racist rants at ‘Lebs’ (there have of
course been other racist tags in the recent past, such as Paki,
Chong, Wog) have been considered as built-up resentment against
Arabs; undercurrents of Islamophobia fuelled by radio shock-jocks;
and the result of alcohol consumption. However, reports also reveal
that an abiding sense of threat in white suburbia of being
outnumbered by Muslims had been a motive in the riots.
Race concerns at different times, be it against Muslims or
Indians/South Asians demonstrate that Australia must deal with the
hard and inconvenient truth that the race card is played for a
variety of reasons. Rather that pushing it under the rug, the
authority should give it the highest priority. It should be a
greater concern that if race is not a crucial factor, how is that
so many South Asians/Indians are being targeted?
How do these events shape Australia’s future education policies?
I would suggest that beyond the race factor, flawed immigration
policies linked to the education sector have contributed to the
vulnerability and therefore the increased violence against South
Asian/Indian students.
Billions at stake
The attacks on international students have grave implications
for Australia. The government is finally looking into the matter of
international student safety and security. According to Australian
Government statistics there were over 450,000 international student
enrolments in Australia in 2007, 18 per cent above 2006. The
financial concern following these events is a cause for concern for
both public and private sectors involved in education and
immigration. International students bring billions of dollars into
Australian educational institutions. For example, in MBA courses
international students each pay up to USD 40,000 a year.
Undergraduate students pay USD 30,000 a year which brings it to a
minimum of USD 120,000-150,000 including various other
expenditures. But given the current circumstances, many
international students may not want to consider Australia as their
destination because of concerns for personal safety.
International students contributed about USD 13.7 billion to the
Australian economy in 2007-8, with the figure estimated to have
risen to USD 15.5 billion in 2009. In July 2008, there were a total
of 459,692 international students enrolled in Australian education
institutions, which is a 20 per cent increase in enrolments from
previous years. A total of 455,000 students were studying in
Australia on student visas in 2007, an increase from 380,000 in
2006. Of these students, 177,954 were in higher education in
undergraduate and graduate schools. A report by IDP Education
states that vocational education and training (VET) is the fastest
growing sector at 46.5 per cent of the total, with India, China and
Korea the largest VET markets. In other areas, university
enrolments also increased by 2.7 per cent and English language
courses were up to 28 per cent from 2007. In 1994, Indian students
represented just 1.5 per cent of the 102,000 international onshore
students. From 2004-2009, the number of Indian/South Asian students
rose to 109,356, just over 19 per cent of a total over half a
million international students from 200 different countries. The
number of South Asian male students studying in Victoria has grown
by 41 per cent every year since 2004.
In this globalised world, people who are able to move, and who
can afford to move, are on the move. Skilled migrants prefer
various Western destinations, including Australia, to build their
future. It is critical to understand that migration, as a search
for a better future in the West, is the primary motivation for most
South Asian students to enrol in Australian education programs.
Australia’s top five source countries for international students
are (in order), China, India, South Korea, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
The impact of having these students in Australia for its global
soft power is enormous. Many of these students, as future
residents, contribute to the Australian economy. Many go back
and contribute to the growth in their own country or somewhere else
in the world, thereby carrying a memory of Australian life with
them. Many in the Australian global alumni are in powerful
positions and have the ability to shape future relations between
their own institutions and Australian institutions.
After the Howard Government changed its immigration policy in
2001, to allow overseas students who completed their degrees in
Australia to stay on as skilled migrants, various education
institutions and agents took advantage. This controversial policy
originally was linked to responding to domestic skills shortages
but is now perceived to be damaging the Australian education brand.
About 20,000 former overseas students now achieve permanent
residency every year. Most of them are university graduates, some
8000 were accountants in 2008. However, permanent residency visas
issued to cooks significantly increased from 951 in 2005-06 to 3251
in 2008. The Australian education industry has also knowingly
manipulated the desire to migrate. Education promoters from various
colleges and universities often have to be prepared to respond to
questions about finding work to support education and finances in
Australia and about migration.
In particular, dodgy education institutions and migration
agencies, both from the home countries and in Australia, rip off
international students in numerous ways, generating hugely
profitable businesses for both legal and illegal migration
industries. Many private agencies wrongfully guarantee permanent
residency in Australia and link it to their services, which is a
breach of Australia’s immigration regulations. Students complained
that they were shown photographs of Flinders St Station and the
Town Hall in Melbourne and were led to believe that those were
their educational institutions. A small number of fraudulent
students also take advantage of these businesses and pay a
substantial amount of money for fake qualifications to obtain
permanent residency in Australia. Both the Australian and Indian
Governments are cracking down on phony training colleges and
education agencies as visa factories. More than 500 Indian
nationals were refused student visas between July to September 2009
because of fake financial documents, said the Department of
Immigration and Citizenship. Currently, a review of higher
education institutions especially of dubious colleges and TAFE
(Technical and Further Education) are underway. The Australian
immigration department is investigating 23 Victorian and 5 New
South Wales education institutions for breaches of immigration
regulations.
While the issuance of student visas following the recent events
has become more stringent, the Indian media also reports that
Indians have been discouraged from sending their children to study
in Australia. The number of Indians applying for student visas to
Australia has plummeted by 46 per cent, according to the most
recent figures from the Department of Immigration. Australia’s
Tourism Forecasting Committee (TFC) suggests that 4,000 fewer
Indian students are expected in 2010. The TFC states, ‘the
resultant loss in economic value to Australia could be as high as
A$78 million (apx USD $70million) if these enrolments are not
filled by other international students’.
The Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs, Vayalar Ravi, said
Australia must crack down on unscrupulous college operators and
employers who pay students less than the minimum wage. He
rightly stated, ‘If the Government can be so strict in arresting
the students who work more than 20 hours because they are violating
the law, why can’t they arrest the employer who is not paying the
minimum wage?’
There are other concerns too. Some security threats against
Australian agencies in India have been reported. After a series of
events in January beginning with Nitin’s death, the arson attack on
the Guruduara and the violent assaults on cab drivers, diplomatic
relations between India and Australia soured. To make matters
worse, Bal Thackeray, leader of the Shiv Sena, stated that their
activists would target Australians in the Indian Premier League
(IPL). The party newspaper Saamna quoted him stating that the Shiv
Sena will ‘not allow Australian cricketers to step on Mumbai’s
soil’. Also, the Times of India stated that some
interest groups are encouraging Bollywood to take its recently
booming businesses in Australia elsewhere. These antagonistic
statements are of concern to Australian authorities.
Although Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Education
Minister Julia Gillard has downplayed the race angle, she has also
stated that education providers would be shut down if they did not
comply with rules relating to international students. Parliament is
considering an Amendment Bill to the Education Services for
Overseas Students (ESOS) Act 2000, under which the provider would
need to demonstrate that its principal purpose is providing
education and that it is capable of demonstrating a satisfactory
standard. Gillard also visited India last year to control the
public relations damage and assured the Indian Government that
Australia will take the necessary steps to assist Indian students.
She promised annual ministerial dialogues on education with
India.
It is apparent that there are futures at stake here.
International students, especially from the South Asian region make
Australia either their temporary or permanent homes. While the
recent troubles are being portrayed as an issue of racial tension
in the Indian media, some students may be being discouraged or
prohibited from coming to Australia at the moment, as the above
statistics suggest. This crisis will pass in time, but the distrust
and racial anxieties that have been produced will leave lingering
effects and hinder positive social networking outcomes.
While the public debates are not going to help Nitin any longer,
it is crucial that Australia takes a hard look at its hidden race
relations issues and the education sector so that not another life
is lost. On the other hand, Indian civil society, especially the
media in its advocacy, must act conscientiously to ensure that
thousands of other Indians who have made Australia their home do
not become entangled in a messy ‘us vs them’ debate, as a
consequence of recent questions of racial relations.
