Bashed up in Oz, Indian eyes Singapore

An Indian student in Melbourne plans a transfer to a Singapore university after being beaten up by two young men and racially abused on Friday.

Sunny Bajaj, 20, from Delhi, a student of accounting at Deakin University, Melbourne, told DNA he was alighting from his car near his home in Boronia, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, around 9pm on Friday, when two persons accosted him and demanded money.

“I said I didn’t have any. I showed them my wallet. But they started beating me,” said Bajaj, the fourteenth Indian to be racially attacked in Australia in recent times. “They punched my face. My nose started bleeding.”

When he tried to retrieve his fallen spectacles, an assailant pulled him up by his shirt and punched him on the head. “I tried to push him back and scramble into the car. But when I opened the door, one of them slammed it on my hand, fracturing it,” Bajaj said. The two aggressors backed off only when a car passed by.

Although the assailants — one white and the other “of African descent” — hurled racist slurs, Bajaj believes it was a case of attempted mugging. But the incident rattled him and his family in India. He and two friends have written to the National University of Singapore (NUS) to seek a transfer of their credits to complete the course there.