WINDOW TO AUSTRALIA - Has cricket shaped India’s perception of its neighbours?

By Swapan Dasgupta

It has been a great fortnight for xenophobes and the champions of ‘Fortress India’. First there was the much-discussed Time magazine dubbing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh an ‘underachiever’, a description that produced bouts of hysterical over-reaction from the Congress Party. Then there was the bitter complaint by the Prime Minister of Singapore over the uncertain business environment in India—an observation that was greeted in embarrassed silence since the small city state can hardly be accused on nurturing a sinister political agenda. And finally there was President Barack Obama’s interview to the Press Trust of India over the obstacles in the path of foreign direct investment in India. Although what President Obama said was nothing that hadn’t been said inside the country by Indians, it led to a bipartisan assertion of Indian sovereignty. ‘We will do what suits us’ was the refrain of a political class that falls back on flag waving when expedient.

Amid this mood of prickliness that has engulfed a part of Lutyens’ Delhi ever since ratings agencies such as Standard & Poor’s began expressing doubts over the efficacy of the India story, it is heartening that there is some good news for the beleaguered nationalists. Ironically, it has come from a part of the world that does not figure very high in the Indian perception of the world. In its report Beyond the Lost Decade released earlier this week, a taskforce of the Australia India Institute of the University of Melbourne has spelt out concrete steps that both New Delhi and Canberra can take to make the bilateral relationship more meaningful.

The specific recommendations set out in this extremely lucid and erudite report—reading it was a pleasure—on issues such as business, immigration and the inner workings of the under-staffed Ministry of External Affairs will, hopefully, receive the necessary attention in both countries. However, what fascinated me were some of the intriguing observations made by the report (a joint effort of three Indians and three Australians) on the role of cricket in shaping perceptions of Australia in India.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that if Australia figures in India’s popular imagination, it is due to cricket. For most Indians, Australia is the land of Sir Donald Bradman, Richie Benaud, Steve Waugh, Shane Warne and even the much misunderstood Greg Chappell. Melbourne figures in the consciousness of Indian decision-makers not because of some brawls involving dodgy students but because of the Boxing Day test at the legendary Melbourne Cricket Ground. For Australians too and more so after the centre of the cricket economy shifted from London to Mumbai in the mid-1990s, the few times India figures on the radar are because of cricket.

In a revealing analysis of the Sydney Morning Herald between Sptember 2010 and August 2011, the report discovered that out of the 405 published stories on an India-related theme, 170 were on cricket—followed by (quite reassuringly) 100 stories on business. There were also 36 news items on geopolitics and only 9 on Indian politics. This is hardly surprising. A poll in parts of the erstwhile Soviet Union would have revealed that India is invariably equated with Raj Kapoor. Such are the vagaries of what is now glorified as ‘soft power’.

The Australia India Institute has recognised the importance of cricket in conferring on Australia “a name recognition that is astonishing in a country and a subcontinent most of whose 1.2 billion people are remarkably self-absorbed, with only a fleeting interest in the rest of the planet…(That its) top cricketers were Australia’s most identifiable faces in India was acknowledged as an opportunity in this narrow context.” At the same time, the report argues that the disproportionate importance attached to cricket has reinforced stereotypes of an Australia that has changed dramatically since the ‘white Australia’ policy was abandoned in 1973.

The reason given is curious: “As it happens, (India’s) window to Australia is the one Australian national institution that is the least multicultural and most prone to promoting an older, even outdated idea of the country: its cricket team. With few exceptions, Australian cricket remains largely an Anglo-Celtic preserve. When Indians superimpose the idea of the cricket team on the rest of Australia, they obviously see a very different country and society from the one that Australians themselves see, live and experience.” Consequently, the argument goes, “there is an instinctive uncertainty among the Indian establishment as to where Australia fits in Asia.”

If the objective behind this indictment of a traditional and time-tested relationship was to argue for a cricket-plus approach, it would be understandable. However, the problem with positing a theory rooted in contemporary academic fashion is that it ignores the fact that Indians, and least of all the Indian establishment, isn’t innately uncomfortable whites, as long as their whiteness isn’t complicated by cultural condescension. India, for example, has the best of relations with South Africa, another cricketing nation where the game is still set in the social mould of the apartheid years. Will that relationship be significantly enhanced if there were more blacks and Asians representing the South Africa Test side? Are Indians prone to viewing a Shane Warne or a Jacques Kallis with suspicion at the IPL matches because they are white?

Take the United Kingdom, with which India has had an enduring but historically over-burdened relationship. Why is it that Indian visitors to London—and their numbers keep multiplying each year—still prefer a visit to Buckingham Palace to a wander down Brick Lane? Why does the England of Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse and Downton Abbey continue to fascinate English-speaking Indians? That England is old, class-ridden, exclusionary and on the retreat. But has the notion of Cool Britannia that the post-Thatcher generation has promoted so assiduously made the prospect of the ‘enhanced partnership’ more appealing? Or, are the two countries not assessing bilateral relationships through the prism of self-interest?  

Even a casual visitor to Melbourne and Sydney will realise that the stereotype of white Australia does not hold any longer. However, does the prevailing multiculturalism of Australia by itself enhance its attractiveness to India? The answer is mixed. Rigid social attitudes, especially those accompanied by a wariness of the foreigner, are a deterrent to good relations, both business and diplomatic. However, a diverse society by itself is of no incremental benefit. India is an open society which is socially conservative and, often, closed. But this has little bearing on its worth as a strategic or commercial partner.

There are many compelling reasons why Australia and India need to discover each other purposefully. Cricket and the English language are worthwhile foundations for the mutual exploration process to proceed. But in the long run, there are larger questions. Does India seek a worthwhile role in the Indian Ocean and is it willing to invest in it? How does Australia balance its business relationship with China with the yearning for a strategic relationship with India? How much is Indian business willing to invest in the natural resources of Australia? Can India provide a market for Australia’s farm and dairy sector? These are issues on which the future of Australia-India relations will hinge.

The role of people of Indian origin who have made Australia their home is a small, yet important, factor in the relationship. But whereas the diaspora has an understandable interest in demolishing the last vestiges of Sir Robert Menzies’ legacy, and even changing the demographic composition of the Australian cricket team, these are of little interest to India.


Telegraph, July 20, 2012 

A Common Bond: Australia has the potential to attract Indian investors

By Swapan Dasgupta

After the obligatory visits to the waterfront to see Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, tourists in Sydney are encouraged to walk up George Street to the imposing Queen Victoria Building—a stylish shopping arcade where you can also treat yourself to English tea in the basement. What particularly caught my attention was a bronze statue of the old Queen at the adjoining Bicentennial Plaza. Apart from the never-amused Empress of India looking a shade younger and less grim than she does in the forecourt of Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial, the bronze is significant in one respect: Sydney is its third resting place since it was commissioned at the beginning of the previous century.

Till 1949, the bronze had occupied a pride of place outside the Legislative Assembly of Ireland in Dublin. Following the Republic’s departure from the Commonwealth, the statue had been uprooted and presumably dumped in a bronze necropolis—like the ones in Barrackpore and Coronation Park, Delhi. In 1987, Dublin offered the forgotten relic to the Government of New South Wales which, gratefully accepted, and recorded its gratitude to Ireland in a plaque on the plinth.

It is tempting for South Block, always in need of inspirational ideas, to consider whether the cause of India-Australian friendship will be enhanced by gifting a discarded imperial bronze or two to cities in Australia that missed out on some of the grander commemorative symbols of the ‘mother country’. The well-meaning gesture, unfortunately, is bound to be misconstrued in a country that continues to agonise over the Union Jack in a small corner of its national flag. What was perhaps a casual decision in 1987, dictated as much by aesthetics as a sense of history, will rekindle a debate that Australia seeks to avoid, but which resurfaces periodically in some form of another.

That Australia has been engaged in what someone once called “endlessly coming of age” may seem surprising to those who nurture stereotypes of hard-working, hard-drinking but essentially stupid and bigoted Bushmen dominating the landscape—a carryover from its origins as a penal colony. When former Prime Minister John Howard once described Sir Donald Bradman as the “greatest living Australian”, he created a problem for the PR professionals entrusted with the responsibility of selling modern Australia to the world. A sportsman could be an entertainer, an icon of popular culture but the description “greatest living Australian” was, they felt, a commentary on Australia’s unwillingness to go beyond the frontier spirit. To the cosmopolitan mindset, harking on the Don, or for that matter, on Rod Laver and referring to the Opera House irreverently as “nuns in a scrum” are about as archaic and distracting as associating modern India with maharajas, fakirs and Mother Teresa.

Since the 1970s, when Britain’s membership of the European Union and a succession of immigration laws put the Commonwealth connection in jeopardy, Australia has been mindful of the need to evolve a distinctive identity—something more meaningful than being the Britain of the southern hemisphere. The bid to grapple with what the journalist James Cameron in 1971 detected as “an identity void” often had farcical consequences: a competition to create a national anthem, a bid to create a national dress and even a serious bid to inject something called ‘mateship’ into the Australian Constitution. In 1961, on the occasion of Australia Day, a well-meaning attempt to depict authentic Australian values led to bizarre tableaux: “This had been achieved by putting up a stuffed kangaroo and emu on the right, a stuffed Aborigine on the left, and a coloured portrait of the Queen in the centre.”

Additionally, there have been attempts to rewrite history by stressing the autonomy of the Australian experience. A former Prime Minister Paul Keating who had a way with words and who was obsessed by the ‘identity’ question, tried to supplant the importance of the Anzac Day commemoration of the massacre of Australian forces in Gallipoli (in Turkey) by shifting focus to the defence of Kokoda against the Japanese invasion of then then Australia-held Papua in 1942. To Keating, the Australians who fought in Kokoda died defending not “the old world but the new world—their world.”   

Nor should these attempts to recreate a nation to correspond with contemporary priorities be mocked: India too is forever engaged in battles over history and identity and generating contested perceptions of nationhood. In coping with post-imperial realities, Australia has travelled a very long way.

First, the White Australia immigration policy that a former Prime Minister Alfred Deakin justified in 1901 as driven by a desire to create a community “inspired by the same ideas…of a people possessing the same general cast of character, tone of thought—the same Constitutional training” has been well and truly junked.  It is not that the process was without hiccups but the point to note is that in 25 years, Australia has been able to create a truly multiracial society. The debate today is not over Asian immigration but the integration of the New Australians with the rest—a battle between multiculturalism and common sense.

Secondly, along with jettisoning the White Australia policy has been an acknowledgment of the wrongs perpetrated on the Aborigines, the Old Australians. Even a casual visitor to Australia will be struck by the very conscious attempt of both state and society to include Aborigines as being crucial to the Australian experience.

Thirdly, Australia has taken important steps to make its economy more open, globalised and competitive. It is fascinating to note the similarities between the protectionist Australia of the 1980s and the India of the same period. It is even more instructive to follow the career paths of Sir Robert Menzies (Prime Minister from 1949 to 1966) and Jawaharlal Nehru (Prime Minister from 1947 to 1964). This comparison may be offensive to Nehruvians who are inclined to view Menzies as a reactionary Anglophile. However, the rich debates on political economy in both countries would suggest had Nehru been as receptive as Menzies was to combining protectionism and welfare with encouragement of the private sector, the post-Independence India story would have been more dazzling.

Finally, Australia has emerged as a middle power of consequence and seems determined to make its mark in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region. For long, India viewed this with suspicion, seeing Australia as an appendage of Anglo-American interests. This view has changed but not changed sufficiently to facilitate genuine trust. There is still a wariness centred on accumulated baggage from another age.

Australia’s muddle over its national identity has not helped matters. In seeming over anxious to establish its Asian credentials, Australia has often projected a contrived image of itself. The Anglo-Celtic and Judaeo-Christian underpinnings of Australia are acknowledged in India and respected. Indians are not disoriented by the symbolic role of the Queen, the English street names in cities, the passion for cricket, the absence of a gun culture, voluble parliamentary democracy, federalism and the rule of law. It reminds them of a common past and, in some cases, an ideal.  

There has been a spate of big ticket Indian private sector investments in Australia—mainly but not exclusively in the mining sector. This owes considerably to Australia’s favourable business environment and its non-turbulent political culture.  But it is also complemented by the fact that this is a country whose institutions and culture they are familiar with. Indians are among the largest investors in the United Kingdom for precisely these reasons. Australia can become a parallel attraction.

The Empire may be a contested legacy for both countries, but it is also a bond.

The Telegraph, October 14, 2011

A Look Down Under

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is ironic that the spate of “race attacks” on Indian students in Melbourne and Victoria province in 2009-10 and the extremely shrill coverage of the phenomenon by the media in India may have contributed to an upturn in Indo-Australian relations.

The attacks appear to have spurred the Australian political establishment into two major initiatives.

First, there has been a dramatic clean-up of the higher education sector, including a conscious policy of projecting the excellence of mainstream Australian universities. At the risk of losing some student numbers in the short run, Australia appears to have discouraged new foreign students from enrolling in dodgy colleges.

Secondly, Australia has initiated a serious process of trying to understand the complexities and angularities of a country they had hitherto been content playing cricket against. India, it has dawned on a China-obsessed Australian establishment, is also an important Asian player with lots of economic potential.

The Indian response has been characteristically slower and ponderous.

However, despite the institutionalised wariness of anything new, there is a creeping awareness that the “Look East” policy cannot stop at Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia but has to factor in another great success story “down under” — despite problems of purchasing Australian uranium.

This overdue Eureka moment of Indian diplomacy had, of course, been preceded by the journey of an unshackled Indian private sector to Australia.

While the Indian and Australian strategic community are engaged in dissecting the future of the Indian Ocean community, Indian business houses have invested in Australia’s mineral wealth and taken advantage of its skilled workforce, stable currency and open economy.

Having spent a very agreeable week in Melbourne and Sydney at the invitation of the Australia-India Institute in Melbourne, my real regret is that I didn’t discover Australia earlier.

For very long, Australia has both benefited and suffered from its geographical aloofness. Except for a brief moment in 1942 when an expanding Japan came close to threatening its security, the “down under” location has meant that Australia has been insulated. This has enabled the country to evolve a distinct national temperament that combined hard work, lots of outdoor life and irreverence.

What is truly remarkable about Australia is that the sharp barracking on the cricket grounds rarely gets translated into social disharmony. What is on display is not raw aggression but friendly banter. Australia is a country that is, by and large, at peace with itself. In today’s world that is saying a lot.

A feature of the Indian media coverage of the Melbourne attacks Australians objected to particularly was the repeated accusation of “racism”. It was interesting that this objection was forcefully echoed by many Indian students in Melbourne and Indian professionals in Sydney.

“This is truly a friendly and accommodating country,” I was assured by them. One couple confessed that the shrillness of the Indian media (widely reported within Australia) had embarrassed them. “I kept wondering,” a young techie told me in Sydney, “whether my work mates felt we thought of them as racists.”

Without delving into the question of race relations from the multiculturalist perspective, certain broad conclusions are in order. First, the “white” Australia policy which formed a basis of the Australian Settlement till the late-1970s is now distant memory. Both Melbourne and Sydney are about as visibly cosmopolitan as you can get. The sheer diversity of today’s Australia is insufficiently appreciated in India.

Secondly, jettisoning some of the less appetising features of the Australian Settlement, including immigration and protectionism, has not involved a wholesale rejection of the British inheritance.

What has contributed to the robustness of modern Australia is that at least three of the most positive features of the British way of life have struck deep roots in Australia: parliamentary democracy, rule of law and civilised driving. The implications are important. Australians value their inheritance and the institutions that have been created over the past two centuries.

Australia has revitalised itself through immigration. But it has implicitly expected new immigrants to be mindful of a past which they may not have shared but which they are not expected to repudiate. The resounding defeat of the proposal to turn Australia into a republic in the 1999 referendum suggests that the country is unwilling to countenance a sharp rupture with the past.

Contemporary Australia is well integrated into the global economy. It is a free market economy with an elaborate welfare net and a stable political system that avoids wild policy fluctuations with changes of government.

At the same time, there is a spectacular degree of self-contentment that has contributed to what the head of the Sydney-based Lowy Institute Michael Wesley has described as “insular internationalism” — a description equally applicable to India.

This basically means that it is a benign Australian sense of self-satisfaction that both drives its global engagements and also restrains it. Australia isn’t an Asian power and nor does it aspire to be one. Yet, it would be a mistake to judge it as a cultural outpost of Britain or a political outpost of the US. The exceptionalism that marked its history until the 1990s lingers, but with less rigidity.

There is one Australia represented by the exuberance of a Paul Keating and the intellectual dash of a Kevin Rudd. Equally there is another Australia personified by the ethical values of a John Howard. To engage with Australia, India has to engage with both Australias.

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, October 7, 2011

Of cooks, barbers and Australians (January 10, 2010)

By Swapan Dasgupta
For an emerging international player, the Ministry of External Affairs should have an iconic status. In the past weeks, the MEA has, unfortunately, acquired an image of frivolity with its junior Minister constantly getting into scrapes over his Twitter-ing ways and the senior Minister being mocked for being more preoccupied with his appearance than his charge. The perceptions may well be unfair but they have contributed to an overall feeling that South Block could do with an injection of gravitas.

There are times, however, when flippancy may serve an unwitting purpose. Last week, SM Krishna made a telling comment on Australia’s education industry and what he thought was Indian gullibility: “One can understand students going there (Australia) at the university level, at the IIT level or at the level of some other institution of excellence. When I went there, I was shocked to see so many students in courses they don’t need to go to Australia for — such as learning hair-styling or doing facials.”

Krishna needs to be complimented on his belated discovery that the 66,000 Indians who went to Australia last year on student visas aren’t exactly interested in rocket science and that they are unlikely to be short-listed in future for the Nobel Prize. Australia has cleverly used its education industry for two strategic ends. First, to earn itself a whopping Au$ 15 billion, of which the largest share comes from India, each year; and, second, to use bucket shops (masquerading as institutes of ‘higher education’) as a primary point of immigration. The Minister would have been surprised to learn that hair-styling, which he ironically looks down on, and commercial cookery were two of the recognised vocations for converting student visas into residence permits. Australians, it would seem, were short of barbers (or hair stylists if you prefer) and cooks (or chefs if you so like) and were glad to facilitate their entry into the country. The country had the additional satisfaction of knowing that the bulk of these preferred immigrants have paid for the privilege of meeting the manpower shortage.

Australia must be congratulated for evolving a unique, revenue-generating immigration model. It is qualitatively different from that of the US which doles out generous scholarships to the best and the brightest students from India and allures them into the American dream. The US has believed that a particular type of immigrant enhances the creative and competitive thrust of its economy; Australia has used education to cope with basic labour shortages — and not merely in hair-dressing saloons and restaurants. What has made Australia attractive to India’s less academically-inclined students is the fact that studies are at a serious discount. The students pay a whopping fee to an institute and then devote themselves to earning money driving taxis or working as shop attendants in retail establishments, particularly those that are open late into the night. Australian universities, an unnamed academic is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, “used to be a place of learning; now they are a place of earning.”

I don’t know why Australia persists with the fiction of issuing student visas: These are short-term work visas with a steep entry fee.
 
This is not to mention that all Australian education is an eye-wash. There are well-regarded universities in the country, maybe even in Melbourne too. The question is: How many of the one lakh plus Indian students are enrolled in them?

It is pertinent to point out the grim reality of what passes for education, particularly in a city such as Melbourne, to disabuse ourselves of the notion that Indian ‘students’ are being targeted by Australians. It is not a town versus gown clash that has made Indians the favourite whipping boys of every disgruntled lout emerging from a pub. Those who are being targeted are Indian workers, the reserve army of potential immigrants.

This doesn’t make the attacks any less heinous. If Australians are repelled by the growth of Indian ghettos in the suburbs of Melbourne and disgusted by the curry smells and Hindi film songs, they must realise that it is a problem of their own creation. It is they who wanted cheap labour and there is a social price to be paid for this luxury.

There is a social problem that is affecting Melbourne and whether Australia likes it or not, it has a strong racial dimension. The crime statistics suggest that Indians are 2.5 times more vulnerable to attacks than others in Melbourne, and yet Australian authorities pretend that crime is colour-blind. The argument is patently disingenuous.

Australia won’t lose brownie points if it honestly admits that the State of Victoria has a serious problem of race-related crimes. It is not going to take away from the fact that the country has travelled a long way from the ‘Whites only’ immigration policy it pursued until the 1960s. Nor will India question the right of Australia to cut down student visas in future because MEA has already recognised that most of the courses aren’t worth spending hard-earned money on. But Australia cannot expect India to sit by idly as its citizens are set upon by goons and harassed and even killed.

The Ku Klux Klan analogy of an Indian tabloid may be an exaggeration (and it certainly wasn’t very funny) but the response to Indian shrillness is not stone-faced Australian denial. Nor does it lie in shrill Australian indignation over the sheer effrontery of India calling someone else racist.

The point which Australia has recognised insufficiently, and which Indians don’t seem to have recognised at all, is that India means something quite different to what it meant 30 years ago. If the race attacks don’t cease, it would be worth the MEA’s while to make the travel advisory more stringent and, as a final resort, advise the Reserve Bank of India to stop all fresh money remittances to Australia for ‘education’ purposes.

Sunday Pioneer, January 10, 2010

Don't tar all of Australia as racist (June 7, 2009)

By Swapan Dasgupta


The Vietnam War triggered a bizarre youth rebellion in the heartlands of Capitalism. Soaked in a heady cocktail of Marcuse, Mao and marijuana, the disaffected generation brought about a revolution in music and lifestyles. Simultaneously, they reduced the accumulated wisdom of many generations to abusive sloganeering. It became routine and almost a caricature for inchoate rebels to denounce every paid-up member of the establishment with the epithet "fascist pig".

Yesterday's rebels are now in their 60s but their insidious legacy of compressing human experience into capsuled slogans has not merely persisted but been sanctified by cash-rich, talking shops such as the UN. Fading memories have relegated the denunciation of 'fascism' to the archives. In its place has emerged a new political correctness centred on empowerment, victimhood and, in many cases, the forthright rejection of ordinary decencies. In the hierarchy of today's slogan-speak, the charge of 'racism' is almost equivalent to the medieval disavowal of lepers.

A wariness of the counter-prejudice nurtured by the new hierarchy of political correctness should not blind us to the relatively more enlightened set of values that are now the global norm. The feeling of cultural superiority that coexisted with the exercise of power in the pre-World War II era has yielded place to a new moral relativism. Tolerance, pluralism and human rights define today's fashion. For this we have to be grateful to those who shouted "fascist pig" at the symbols of authority a few decades ago.

As a nation that has tried to reinvent itself from a 'white' Dominion to what its PM Kevin Rudd described as a "country of great diversity, harmony and tolerance", Australia has been shaken by the outcry over the assault on Indian students in Melbourne. Despite the official suggestion that the epidemic of attacks - some 1,447 people of Indian origin have been assaulted in Victoria in the past 12 months - are the handiwork of "idiotic thugs", the wide impression that Indians have been targeted on account of their colour have been deeply wounding to Australians.

'Middle Australia' has responded to the charge of racism with visible irritation. Writing in the Herald Sun last week, a columnist couldn't conceal his disbelief that "India which perfected the caste system and is plagued by Hindu-Muslim bloodfests, is telling us that we are too prejudiced".

Leaving aside the archaic condescension with which he views a country that contributes 90,000 students to Australia's $2 billion higher education industry, the writer's indignation isn't misplaced. Australia could easily have remained the predominantly white country it was till the 1980s. With the aboriginal minority edged out to the margins by ruthless settlers, the "Australian way of life" could have become the successful version of the failed experiment in Southern Rhodesia. The point is that Australia chose a different 'multicultural' route, a consideration that must weigh against the charge that it is inherently racist.

No doubt there are Australians who harbour deep racial prejudices. Some, like Pauline Hanson, made a big political splash 10 years ago. There are other Australians who are plain frightened by the demographic and cultural transformation of their cities. The Indian 'students' who work inhospitable night shifts and drive taxis to either pay for college or secure permanent residency are no doubt industrious and law abiding. They are also seen as doing jobs the locals don't want to touch but which are necessary to keep the economy ticking. Yet, despite their contribution to the national economy, they are also viewed by locals with a suspicion that is born of cultural unfamiliarity.

The phenomenon isn't unique. The wariness felt by some Marathi manoos at the growing number of Chhat pujas in Mumbai correspond to the bewilderment of old Birmingham residents at the transformation of some parts of the city into Pakistani ghettos. In Mumbai, the emotionally beleaguered turn to the Shiv Sena or its more excitable cousin, MNS; likewise the British National Party appeals to those who feel strangers in their own country. Both responses are, arguably, "racist" but since similar responses cut across national and ethnic lines there is also a universalism to desperate responses born out of an inability to cope with change.

Yet, the people most affected by the transformation of their neighbourhoods aren't necessarily the ones who beat up hapless students on a Melbourne train. All evidence suggests that the assaults on Indians are the handiwork of social misfits and hoodlums who aren't all white Australians. There is a distinction between prejudice and criminality.

There is a case for an Indian travel advisory against travelling to Australia because its streets are unsafe. But there is no need to go that extra mile and tar the country with the brush of racism.

Sunday Times of India, June 7, 2009