THE truth”, says Oscar Wilde, “is rarely pure, and never simple”. This is especially true in the case of the recent spate of attacks on Indian students that are being attributed to a mix of racism and opportunism in Australia.

Most incidents of “curry bashing” (South Asians are called “curries” in Australia) are occurring in Melbourne, a sprawling cosmopolitan metropolis that is home to some 140 nationalities from the world over who speak in over 120 different languages.

The issue is far more complex and needs to be seen in deeper perspective. First some statistics, which are instructive. There are about 98,000 students from India studying in Australia, almost half of which (46,038 as of 2008) are enrolled in various educational institutions in and around Melbourne alone, forming the state of Victoria’s largest group of overseas students. In 2008, Indian students accounted for 29 per cent of the total 1,59,763 international students enrolled in Victoria, a percentage that is expected to have increased in 2009.

This is exponential compared to 2002 when Indian students accounted for just 7 per cent of the international students in Victoria. In six years from 2002 to 2008, there has been an eight-fold rise in the number of Indian students. The most pronounced rise has occurred in the last three years, which has accounted for a staggering 140.9 per cent increase from 19,105 in 2006 to 46,038 in 2008.

And so have attacks on Indian students. Indian victims accounted for 1,082 crimes in the 2006-2007 financial year, which rose by 33.7 per cent to 1,447 in 2007-2008 reflecting an average of four attacks a day. Yet, there are many more attacks that have gone unreported by students who either fear that it may adversely affect their subsequent application for immigration or feel that nothing is likely to come of it. Clearly, there is a crisis of confidence in a police force in which ethnic representation has been more symbolic than substantive in multi-cultural Victoria.

But then, this is not just about numbers and ratios. For, it is quite evident that Indian students are being selectively targeted for reasons that are increasingly appearing to be racism-fuelled opportunism. In the past, ethnic groups from African countries or eastern Europe usually engaged in attacks on Indians. But media reports suggest that the recent spate of attacks on Indian students are mostly being carried out by Australians of Anglo-Saxon origin aged mainly between 18 and 25.

In December 2007, a remark made by cricketer Harbhajan Singh against Andrew Symonds in the heat of a match was taken up with the ICC as an act of racial abuse with pronounced righteous indignation by the Australian cricket team. In contrast, violence against Indian students is being simply dismissed by the police as acts of opportunism. If indeed that is true, then why aren’t other ethnic communities, notably the Chinese, also a highly visible ethnic group, being attacked?

So why should Indian students be singled out for attacks in a city that has become the country’s multi-cultural hub? More so, in a city that has been ranked by The Economist as among the top three of the ‘World’s Most Livable Cities’ since 2002 and also ranked by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) as among the world’s top five university cities in the Global University Cities Index in 2007?

First, a basic home truth: Most Indian students arrive in Australia with the desire to permanently settle down with education as the route. Just how much of a success Australia’s mercantile approach to the internationalisation of education has become is evident from the fact that the international education industry pegged annually at $15 billion is the nation’s third largest after coal and iron.

Further, Australia has the highest proportion (19 per cent) of international students in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of developed countries with high-income economies.

Indian students in Australia broadly fall in two categories. One, those belonging to relatively better economic and educational backgrounds who are enrolled in various degree courses in mainstream universities such as Monash, Melbourne, La Trobe, RMIT and Deakin.

The second category, which forms the majority, are those enrolled in diverse vocational courses in government and private Technical and Further Education (TAFE) and other such institutes that act more as visa factories than institutions of learning. It is precisely these students, studying in privately owned TAFEs, who have been most prone to attacks and have become the centre of attention.

Behind their vulnerability to attacks lies a sordid story of deception and exploitation of Indian youth who, regrettably, are also considerably at fault, blinded as they are by their eagerness to migrate overseas rather than being driven by a desire to study.
Unknown even to them, their tale of horror starts even before they leave India.
Australia-based educational institutions employ recruiting agents in India. Their brief is to get as many students as they can for which they are paid up to 25 per cent of the course fee as commission per student. This is indeed big money and so agents end up exploiting the ignorance and desire of the youth to migrate feeding them with lies about their colleges, their courses, living expenses, dream jobs and immigration. In the number game that is important for the success of any commercial venture, agents have been targeting youth from rural and semi-rural parts of India, particularly Punjab where immigration and education shops have been mushrooming in the recent past.

Such agents are known to have even misled gullible students with pictures of glamourous looking buildings and even railway stations (example, the majestic-looking Flinders Street station in Melbourne) passing them off as university buildings in a bid to enroll them in vocational courses such as hairdressing, cookery, hospitality and auto mechanics.
Unlike immigration agents who have to be licensed by the Australian government, there is no such regulation for education agents. For the educational institutions and the agents alike it is pure and simple commerce. Simply put, prospective students are treated as clients but fleeced with ruthless precision.

So what happens when these youth reach Australia? To their horror they discover that rather than the fancy campuses they saw in pictures back home, many privately owned TAFEs in fact function out of a few rooms rented in some building in and around Melbourne’s central business district (CBD). It is not unusual for Indian students to find that they (Indians) comprise the only grouping in a particular course in a TAFE. Most TAFEs have no provision for hostel accommodation. Living is simply unaffordable in the highly expensive CBD, a concrete jungle comprising a mix of blue chip offices, expensive theatres, high-end art galleries and museums, five star hotels, fancy restaurants and high-rise luxury apartments.

Thus, trapped with no support system, these students, most of whom also make the mistake of arriving with little money, look for the nearest cheap accommodation. But where is such accommodation available? In crime infested suburbs especially located in western and northwestern Melbourne that are usually inhabited by a mix of low-income group population, drug addicts, drunkards, unemployed youth, rowdy elements and social misfits of other kind.

Having realised their desperate situation, some unscrupulous money-minded landlords end up charging rents as high as $500 per room a week in contrast to the usual average of between $150 and $250 in an up market suburb. To save on rent, there are instances of up to 10 students sharing a room in unhygienic conditions in utter violation of housing rules even as landlords look the other way.

Often accommodation in such localities is unsafe and of poor quality. For example, in January 2008, three Indian students were gruesomely burnt to death in their sleep in Melbourne’s western suburb of Footscray after their room caught fire due to a short circuit.

With no major educational qualifications and poor English language skills, many Indian students studying at TAFEs and other such low-end institutes take to menial jobs working as night cleaners in offices, waiters in Indian restaurants and eateries, driving taxis and manning petrol stations and retail counters in both convenience and grocery stores. This means working until late and returning to their homes located in unsafe and crime-prone suburbs where even respectable locals fear to venture.
This automatically makes them a visible and vulnerable soft target. In their desire and need for money, many Indian students end up consciously exceeding the 20 hours-a-week work rule. Since they usually get paid in cash, students end up carrying loose cash, which adds to their vulnerability.
This flies in the face of the usual sensible precautions any person, especially a foreign visitor, should take in any city the world over where there usually are relatively unsafe and crime prone parts. Partially due to their visibly increased numbers and partly due to their living and working conditions, Indian students have thus unwittingly ended up suffering disproportionately compared to students from other nationalities.
In contrast to Indian students, the Chinese are economically better off, do not take to menial jobs in such large numbers, live in safer areas and do not travel that late. Many even have their own cars.
But this is only one part of the story. There is also the issue of how many Indian students conduct themselves both in their educational institutions and in public. Many students from rural and semi-rural India or from underprivileged backgrounds are unable to cope with the western education system, which requires self-study, encourages individual thinking, focuses on research and analysis and discourages spoon-feeding and rote learning as is the practice in India.
In public, many Indian students tend to stick in groups, mix little with the local population, are loathe to improve their English and to understand local customs and culture whether it is smiling each time one makes eye contact with strangers or adopting the courtesy of using a “sorry”, “please” and “thank you” where needed in a conversation.
Neither is it uncommon for Indian students to smell, stare at people, to speak loudly, flash gadgets such as cell phones and embark or disembark from public transport with little consideration to their fellow passengers – all acts which unnecessarily draw adverse attention from the public.
An understanding of local customs and culture can help. For example, sometimes just a simple greeting with a confident ‘hey mate’ can help diffuse a developing situation. A stare certainly does not help; neither does a cowardly or a scared expression.
But does their lack of soft skills and disinclination to consciously adjust with the mainstream society justify attacks against them? Certainly not! The repeated attacks on Indian students do not detract from the bare fact that there exists a law and order problem Down Under. Whether or not these are crimes being perpetrated by racist elements or by opportunists, as the Victorian police would like Indians to believe, the fact remains that Melbourne in particular has a serious crime problem on its hands that is unlikely to help its image.
The Australian government has been making the right noises about the need to stop these attacks. In contrast, there have been fewer such public statements from the Victorian government. The Victorian police has been economical in acknowledging that there even exists a problem in the first place.
A prompt response on the part of the Victorian police coupled with urgently required confidence building measures would have gone a long way in stemming the incidents of violence and in instilling reassurance in the minds of students and their families in India.
Instead, by getting tangled in a web of words to describe the motive behind the attacks, the police in Melbourne has demonstrated neither the compassionate sensitivity that is expected of the keepers of the law nor the scientific and clinical precision in crime-solving that is expected of a professional police force.
In the past, attacks on Indian students were largely solely motivated by robbery. But now there seems to be a qualitative change. The media is reporting that each attack is being accompanied with expressions of racial hatred.
Baljinder Singh was stabbed in a train after he handed over his cash. Again, Shravan Kumar and his friends were not walking alone or travelling. They were in their house enjoying a private party when gatecrashers broke up the celebration and mercilessly drove a screwdriver through his head. The fact that two teenagers got the better of about 20 attending the party smacks of both cowardice and selfishness by the Indian students.
It is true that there are no signs of organised racist groups. But the attacks by “idiotic thugs”, as Jeremy Jones, an Australian-based expert on racial attacks, terms the perpetrators, has caused enough scare to give the impression that the attacks have racist undertones. In situations such as these, it is not necessarily facts that count. It is perceptions that attain greater credence.
There is, of course, a need to make a distinction between racist individuals and criminals and the rest of the Australian society. Australia is not racist. It officially ended its ‘White Australia Policy’ in 1973 following which there has been an influx of non-white ethnic groups from the Asia-Pacific.
Similarly, India cannot be termed barbaric despite the horrific murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons aged seven and nine who were burnt to death while asleep in a car in Orissa a decade ago.
In addition to the Indian students there are about one lakh Indian settlers in Victoria alone and are rarely recipients of “curry bashing”. But then, as stated earlier, this is often about perceptions, not facts alone.
In the end, it is about crime, whether racist or opportunist, and criminals have to be brought to book. At stake are the lives of innocents and the image of a nation.