WE'VE ASKED FOR THIS

At the official level, reactions to this offensive Indian newspaper cartoon that equates Victorian police with the Ku Klux Klan have been varied. Our red-headed acting Prime Minister is positively flaming with outrage according to ABC news of 8/1/10: "Any suggestion of that kind is deeply deeply offensive to the police officers involved and I would absolutely condemn the making of a comment like that," Ms Gillard said. The Victorian police were equally unimpressed. Mr Cameron, the Victorian Police Commissioner said, "This is just terrible ... Victoria Police is a very tolerant organisation and Victoria is a very tolerant state. To suggest that Victoria Police is racist is just plain wrong and it's offensive to the good police we have here in Victoria." Hear, hear Ms Gillard and Mr Cameron. It is about time our officials broke the reflex habit of simply hanging their heads even lower in shame than customary whenever Australia was accused of being a racist country. The Victorian Opposition leader, Ted Baillieu, however seemed to be slipping back into the default mode of appeasement with his contribution: " ... the cartoon is unhelpful, but [I] can understand the anger in the Indian community".

The death of the Indian student in Melbourne that has reignited the issue of Indian nationals being ill treated in Australia is of course tragic. But then again so were the deaths of the Australians in the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, for which incidentally, we didn't blame all of India for something that was beyond their control, which conversely is what is happening now. Bad things happen.

The world class knee jerk reaction taking place in India is to automatically put the blame for the students death, as well as the assaults that occurred last year, onto us notoriously racism-maddened white devils. This is understandable given that people overseas, when thinking of Australians, invariably think of real Australians.

It is yet though to be established who killed the student, the killer's race or the motive. If the earlier crimes committed against Indians in Australia are any indication, there is a better than fifty per cent chance that the killer wasn't a white Australian. Last year's trouble was caused by Indians allegedly encroaching on the 'territory' of Lebanese Muslims who in turn dealt swift retribution.

Historically, there does not appear to be any love lost between Hindus and Muslims. Of those with any knowledge of the 'Partition' of 1947, who could forget those border-crossing trains arriving at Pakistani and Indian stations with packed carriages gushing blood?

But such was the blind faith - that could only be described as religious - of the engineers of Australian multiculturalism who believed they could perform the miracle of bringing to Australia people who would sooner tear each others throats out as soon as look at each other, yet embracing each other like party-goers on Ecstasy as soon as they landed. Perhaps it had something to do with what they were really putting in those aerosol cans being used to spray the passengers of the jets as they dropped down through the Australian clouds.

More than twenty five years ago Professor Geoffrey Blainey predicted such developments as those now involving the Australian Indian community having serious diplomatic ramifications.
He actually went further. To paraphrase, he foresaw an event such as a powerful nation sending forces into Australia in response to perceived brutality being committed against its nationals or racial kin in Australia. This is not such a far-fetched scenario; it has historical precedents, one of the most notable being Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia in response to the alleged ill treatment of Sudetenland's ethnic Germans. Whether the ill treatment is a pretext or not matters little to the country that has been invaded.

Of course in India there is very little understanding of racism. It's very rare - about as rare as a Chicken Tandoori. 'The [Indian] ... doth protest too much, me thinks.' Taking the high moral ground, it might be hoped, raises him above the rankest hypocrisy. India, for centuries, has been riven by religious, class, caste and racial conflict. Its class system is colour-coded with the lighter skinned rising to the top while those at the other end of the spectrum such as the coal-black Tamils sink to the bottom.

We were given the briefest of insights into this mentality when an Australian non-white cricketer was constantly called a monkey by Indian cricket crowds and even by at least one Indian cricketer. (This may have been what drove him to drink.)

India's 160 million 'harijans', as they were called by Ghandi - better known to us as 'untouchables' are so despised they barely make it into the category of human being. In the caste system they do not even make it on to the first rung of the ladder. When they die, they are not worth the cost of a cremation and even if the wherewithal could be raised it would be frowned upon because cremating someone lacking a soul would be considered a form of sacrilege. At the ancient, holy city of Varanasi on the Ganges where the constantly performed cremations earn the departed a release from the wheel of birth, death and rebirth, the bodies of untouchables are simply flung into the river for the vultures that are quick to spot a free feed.

This attack on us by India is a most egregious case of the pot calling the kettle black. It is however a type of poetic justice after years of sack-cloth wearing and self-flagellation over our terrible, racist past and the constant implied begging for forgiveness from our coloured, northern brothers. Can we really begrudge a few free kicks such as might be aimed at a man who flings himself to the ground as soon as the fight begins?


A damaged church, seen in the village of Raikia, India, after it was allegedly stormed by Hindu fundamentalists, on August 31, 2008. Indian authorities insisted they had halted deadly clashes between Hindus and Christians in the east of the country that have exposed it to stinging criticism. At least 10 people have died and thousands have fled their homes as a result of the violence in the coastal state of Orissa, with the Catholic church accusing police of failing to protect defenceless priests and nuns.