A series of attacks on Indians in Melbourne, Australia culminated a week ago in the stabbing to death of 21-year-old graduate, Nitin Garg. Throughout last year there was an alarming rise in the level of violence against Indian nationals by Australian thugs. There were protests in both Australia and India and an Indian minister postponed a trip to Australia as a way of underlying the depth of anger in the subcontinent.
It is, therefore, hardly surprising that in the wake of the murder of Garg in a Melbourne park, there has been a bitter response in India. Indeed the Mail Today published a cartoon depicting a Melbourne policeman wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and saying, “We are trying to ascertain the nature of the crime”. This was indeed the initial response of Melbourne police who said that there had been a number of other stabbings in the city and that it “just happened” that this time the victim was Indian.
This analysis has simply not been good enough. Given the clear local rise in racist attacks against Indians, the initial presumption should have been that this was a hate crime. The response by the authorities, including the Australian police, has meanwhile been over the top in claiming the Mail Today cartoon to be “deeply offensive”.
What is actually more offensive is that too many people in Australia seem unprepared to admit their country is shot through with a deep vein of xenophobia. This was after all the place that actually hunted the Tasmanian aboriginals to extinction, that for years rode roughshod over its mainland aboriginals, which until 1973 operated a “White only” immigration policy and even “imported” some 7,000 children taken from their poor parents by UK authorities.
National pride is fine when it is fueled by real achievements, such as Australia’s redoubtable prowess at cricket. But it becomes insidiously evil when a country chooses to measure itself by the degree of contempt it can express for people of other races. Australians, of course, are not racist. But by refusing to confront the bigotry that at times seems almost a part of Ozzie culture, they are doing their country a serious disservice. The issue of race crime needs to be confronted, as it has in Europe and North America, and effective steps made to clamp down on it, not least by handing out exemplary penalties for the warped individuals who are motivated by a hatred of foreigners.
Australians should perhaps also wonder how they would react if their own citizens in India had been victims of a string of beatings over more than a year, culminating in a cold-blooded murder.
It is time, therefore, for tempers on both sides to cool and the name-calling to end. Equally, it is time for the Melbourne police to address the likelihood that Garg’s murder is only the most serious of a succession of ugly race crimes. And finally, it is also perhaps time for Australians to explore a dark corner of their national soul.
