The responses of the Indian Government, the Victorian Police and the print and electronic media demonstrate clearly how discursive boundaries were established in the wake of the Melbourne assaults. The stance taken by Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland was one that strongly condemned the attacks and denied any suggestion of racial motivations. This position was reinforced by Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe who argued that Indian students ‘are seen as vulnerable soft targets’ and that the attacks were ‘opportunistic crimes, not racially motivated crimes.’ Meanwhile, in response to these comments, a Federation of Indian Students of Australia spokesperson asked, ‘How can they say that none of these attacks were racist when we hear criminals using terms like curry bashing?’ Nazeem Hussein, a member of the Islamic Council of Victoria, went even further and claimed that these attacks were broadly a result of a failure to tackle racism.
In labelling the crimes primarily ‘opportunistic’, the Victorian police were denying strong links between ethnicity, youth crime and racial violence. Furthermore, the argument that the attacks were due to a failure in tackling racism raises questions about the active promotion of Australian multiculturalism by the Australian government as a means of attracting foreign students.
As wrong as it is to deny the existence of race attacks or racism, it is important to distinguish between race/racism as a heuristic tool and race/racism as a core element in constructing social relations in society. Despite difficulties surrounding the treatment of minorities in Australia, the binary racism/anti-racism discourse deployed by the Victorian Police and various non-state actor actors, such as the Federation of Indian Associations, Victoria and the Indian electronic and print media, exclude any opportunity for dispassionate rational engagement.
The binary race/anti-racism construction raised another important issue of identity and nationalism in the Australian and Indian contexts. One month after the attacks, a two-pronged poll conducted by Singapore’s Blackbox and Australia’s UMR Research found that a majority of wealthy Indians interviewed in India believed ‘Australia to be racist, dangerous and not worth visiting’. Interestingly, the parallel poll conducted in Australia found ’57 per cent of the Australians agreed that racism was a problem in Australia, but 52 per cent believed Indians were also racist, citing the caste system’. The findings of this joint poll shed light on the underlying sub-discourse of identity and nationalism that has characterised much of the response in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out that Indians have historically believed that ‘problems of upper versus low-caste conflict or Hindu-Muslim conflict are significantly a modern problem of ethnicity, whereas racism is thought of as something which white people do to Indians. And the discrimination among Indians is variously described as casteism or communalism but never racism.’ The fact that 52 per cent of Australians cited casteism as a form of racism challenges the ways in which Indians understand their own historical and nationalist predicaments. Despite this apparent contradiction, indignant outrage particularly in the Indian media was not in short supply.
A panel discussion on an Indian television channel posed the question ‘Are countries like Australia still imprisoned in a whites-only mindset?’ The panellists highlighted the contradiction between notions of Australian multiculturalism and Australian national identity. Despite multiculturalism being touted as a strong pull factor for students considering study in Australia, one panellist, Sanjay Srivastava, Professor of Sociology at Deakin University’s Institute of Economic Growth, pointed to the inherent tension and anxiety surrounding Australia’s origins as a nation. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s advocacy of framing Australia as part of Asia, rather than as a European nation, created a schism among so-called cultural elites and middle Australian values. This schism was later exploited by John Howard for political gains. In other debates the treatment of indigenous Australians was evoked to highlight racism within Australian society. Notwithstanding the validity of some of these claims, defining the attacks within the race/racism framework was unhelpful in formulating a mature, nuanced response.
The discourse and its role in exacerbating—or even creating—tension in the aftermath of the attacks has revealed in a perhaps unprecedented way how Australia and India are reflected in both their own eyes and in each other’s. Most significantly the debates reinforce the responsibility of state and non-state actors in both contexts to avoid polarising complex issues surrounding identity and nationalism into simplistic and homogenous categories for the sake of sensationalist headlines.
This article originally appeared on the South Asia Masala – the latest weblog from the College of Asia and the Pacific at the ANU. It aims to drive knowledge and debate on South Asia