A state of denial

Bumper stickers on cars in Melbourne proudly proclaim that the State of Victoria is “the place to be”. Kanan Kharbanda, however, wishes he’d been in any place other than Victoria last year, when he lost his vision in his right eye after being pummelled by a street gang one night at a Melbourne suburban railway station.

The 27-year-old student of accounting at the Melbourne Institute of Technology was with his friend at a taxi rank in Sunshine, the low-income western suburb of Melbourne, when a multi-ethnic gang of youngsters came up and demanded money. When he said he hadn’t any, he told DNA, they beat him up, and hurled racial abuses. “They had knuckledusters on,” he remembers. His facial bones were broken, and the optic nerve of his right eye was severed, rendering him blind for life in that eye.

Kharbanda is only one of many Indian students in Australian cities who have been victims of street violence by young offenders in recent months. The attacks drew unflattering attention to Australia in the world media, including the charge that Australian civil society, for all its manifest multiculturalism and success in integrating waves of immigrants over the decades, perhaps nursed a racist streak.

“Some of these attacks were undoubtedly motivated by racist elements,” Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland says. “But it’s not just Indians, even Chinese students are overrepresented among the victims of street crimes.” However, he adds, many of these were also ‘opportunistic crimes’ on ‘vulnerable victims’. “Many Indian students are struggling financially and tend to live in poor neighbourhoods… They also work casual jobs to support themselves, and work late nights,” which puts them in the wrong place at the wrong time, he adds.

Australian social scientists, however, say it a lot more bluntly. “Racism runs deep in… Australia,” says Sandy Gifford, professor in the school of social sciences at La Trobe University. “It is shameful that we are pussyfooting around the current violence with responses directed at the victims.”

Police narratives that “blame the victims” for the violence — by claiming, as one officer did, that Indian students “spoke loudly in their native languages” — were “dangerous, subjective perceptions,” cautions Stephan Kerkyasharian, chairman of the Community Relations Commission, which works to promote multiculturalism in New South Wales and who has been appointed to head a working committee to offer practical suggestions for Indian and other international students in Australia. “That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”

Peter Gale, senior lecturer in Australian studies at the University of South Australia, too says he finds it “disturbing” that “we’re focussing on the behaviour of Indian students rather than on what can be done… to put in place a more inclusive environment for Indian (and other international) students.” But although Australia has in the past 10 years or so received a bad press internationally, it “actually has a very good record in terms of being a welcoming country over a 50-year period.” Nearly 60 per cent of Australia’s population was either born overseas or has one parent or grandparent who was born overseas, he points out.

Since the Second World War, and particularly after it abandoned its ‘white
Australia’ policy in the 1970s, Australia has gradually become more welcoming of immigrants, and although there have been periodic outbursts of racial bigotry from Conservative and far-right politicians, Australian politics has by and large maintained a semblance of balance. And last year, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered a historic apology on behalf of the nation to Australia’s indigenous aboriginal population, saying that the move was necessary for people to “reconcile the past with their future”. 

Yet, for all its success, race relations occasionally come under strain, and visibly so — and not just from Indian students, either. Last month, Sol Trujillo, a Mexican who stepped down as CEO of Australian telecom company Telco, damned Australia as “racist” and “backward”. Australia’s immigration policies, he said, were “out of step with the modern world”, and going to Australia felt like “stepping back in time”. 

Kerkyasharian concedes that “it is a fact of life that you will have people who pursue a racist agenda”, but denies that “there is endemic racism in Australia.” In fact, he points out, Australia has one of the toughest anti-discrimination laws in the world. And the federal government has initiated efforts to outlaw “hate crimes” and invocations of racially inflammatory rhetoric. The only thing that now needs to be done is for all Australians to “stop denigrating diversity” and accept “the reality of multiculturalism”.