The Ghosts of Botany Bay

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was in the news recently. He proceeded, again, to argue that the spate of recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and other places were “opportunistic” crimes. Why opportunity only strikes Indians — usually around the head — remains unclear. The Indonesians, who were deluged by a tsunami of Australian counter-terror experts after the Bali bombings, must be wondering why none of the perpetrators of hate crimes in Melbourne can be caught, given the expertise Australian security forces claim to have in countries other than their own.

Rudd went on to make the ridiculous counter-claim that when Australian tourists were attacked in India, the Oz state did not treat these as anything but what they appeared to be, namely, economic crimes. He’s got a point, perhaps — Indian criminals who prey on foreign tourists are not exactly equal opportunity thugs — they will go after any white person assuming that the melanin-challenged are more likely to have things of value. But they don’t check their passports to make sure they are members of the rich nations groups of OECD countries as unhappy Estonian and Argentine visitors to the Taj can attest to. The attacks on Indians in Australia are something else: when people of a different race are repeatedly singled out, beaten up, and, most often, no money taken, there can be little doubt that these are nothing but crimes of racial hatred.

It is sad that Rudd can’t or won’t see these actions for what they are. This is the man who shot to the top of the liberal top 10 list when he came to office for his official apology for historical abuse and systemic crimes committed against his country’s aboriginal population. The apology seemed genuine at the time because he didn’t have to do it. In the meantime, the Indian government wonders whether it can actually start to flex its considerable economic muscle and hurt one of Australia’s biggest export earners — higher education — by announcing that it is no longer safe for Indians to study in Oz. If that’s too strong, there are plenty of other foreign policy options to pursue that make it clear that there will be a price for Australia to pay if it cannot begin to control its rednecks.

But there is more to this story than a bilateral tale of denial and ineptitude. Two things in particular are worth noting. The first was the complete absence of local progressive groups from demonstrations against the attacks. Civil libertarians in Australia seem unable or unwilling to see the connection between their own struggles and what is happening to Indian students. They haven’t said a word about them — in support or otherwise — in marked contrast to their vocal disagreement with Oz government policies toward, say, refugees. Why don’t Indian students qualify?

A new generation of young Indians can now to be seen all over urban Australia. Work is not difficult to find, especially if you are willing to work hard in jobs native-born Australians don’t want to do. So, when the average footie fan wants to get home after a night of Australian culture — which can be summarized as serious boozing from the moment the workday ends — he is likely to see young Indian men working everywhere. In the late night greasy spoon café, in the taxi that takes him and his drunken mates home, in the petrol bunk convenience store where he buys a pack of fags; everywhere. ‘Bash the coolies’ is the latest feature in the long post-boozing history of bashing someone, or at least anyone who doesn’t look like Ricky Ponting.

The remarkable visibility of young Indians in Australia today is the starting point of this surge in violence; the ‘opportunity’ that Rudd speaks about reflects the political economy of today’s Australia: the racialisation of who does which jobs, and, when and where they work.

The other point of surprise was the reaction of the Indian community in Australia, the landed immigrants who have made a life for themselves in the country. Like other white settler societies, Australia is a country founded on the original sin of primitive violence and genocide. Raw power created terra nullius; the first colonists then turned around and claimed that nullius was the original view from Botany Bay. Its a remarkable achievement — one might say even post-modern in its sensibility — when you think about it, making reality out of a vision that begins from denial! Kevin Rudd and the Oz civil libertarians, are, in that sense, following a tradition as old as the country.

But denial is also the preferred mode of older Indian immigrants living in Australia. That is less easy to understand. They, especially the early arrivers, faced all kinds of racism from the moment they arrived Down Under. More than other ethnics, they decided to take Australia as it was and denied their own origins except in the most banal and Potemkin-like manner. Now they remember only their strategy for survival. They tell the Indian students to keep your heads down, don’t make waves, don’t fight back, pretend nothing is happening, learn how to make money quietly and then disappear into the suburbs. That was how earlier Indian immigrants learned to survive at a time when a whites-only country was being dragged into a multi-cultural world. If you’re invisible, they argue, you’ll be fine.

Indian Students Protest Outside Parliament Station

Angry Indian students don’t give a hoot for their forbears’ strategy of invisibility. They are visible because of the kinds of work they do, and they don’t have a problem with it. These students are products of a different India, a post-post colonial India, where they don’t have to apologize for speaking Hindi or Telugu in public, where they have the hard currency to go anywhere and demand anything they want, where they expect to be treated as anyone’s equal (they are the sons and daughters of a Real Nuclear Power, after all!)

Earlier generations of Indians Down Under went to Australia to settle down and live the middle class dream: they became hyphenated Australians with alacrity. Today’s students come to Australia from small towns and large farms all over India for many other reasons. Some come because they can’t get admission to good colleges in India. Others find it is cheaper than going to the United States. Still others come to Australia because it is relatively easy to become a permanent resident and to make some money while studying. But whatever the reason, among today’s students there is little or no loyalty to or interest in Australia for its own sake. They have left home to make money and they will return home when the money runs out.

If today’s Indian students decide to stay on and make a home in Australia, they will do it on their own terms, not Australia’s.

The attacks on Indian students should be seen as the latest skirmish in the Great Australian Debate — who is and what does it mean to be an Australian. Today, those old questions are complicated by the condition that a rich white Australia of 20 million people, ever more dependent on foreign trade with its Asian neighbors, has fewer choices than it ever did before, if it is to remain rich. (The white part needs no comment). The heightened public visibility of Indians in Australia today makes them an obvious target: they have become a visual symbol of the unspoken anxiety that tomorrow’s Australia is unlikely to be like yesterday’s.

Coming to terms with a long history of racism against indigenous people and ethnic minorities — the liberal Kevin Rudd — doesn’t lead automatically to knowing how to think liberally about how a multicultural society copes with a post-national global economy. This is the new racism: a 20^th century reaction to a 21^st century world.

Australia’s ‘senior mentor’ Great Britain has slowly been coming to terms with the realization that all immigrants don’t necessarily want to assimilate or to try and become ‘English’. The resolution of that long-standing and bitter debate over “Britishness” is instructive — celebrate Indian Hindus as a model minority and demonize Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims for their regressive cultural practices.

Will not-so-post-colonial Australia also seek to divide and rule? Good Vietnamese vs. Bad Indians?