But I am now tending to listen to the other tangential of the story about the alleged racial attacks on Indians Down Under,
Ultimately, at least in the Indian context, it boils down to valued and unknown money. The overnight manifestation of a less prosperous class of Indians, thanks to a neo-liberal sleight of hand, has recast an erstwhile societal malaise in a new format: the inability of money-making upstarts to acquire good demeanour. The tidings is writ large. So much so that in the liked movie Lage Raho Munnabhai, the hero, a way thug who becomes a Gandhian pacifist, advises a maiden on how to assess a suitor: if at their lover he makes crude noisy gestures to get the waiter’s attention, as so many offspring Indians do, disregard him. Munnabhai had a point.
A unmistakeable feudal upbringing of India’s burgeoning mesial classes has brought with it a culture of prejudices. The steeper the trade climb, the greater the chances of atavistic community traits tagging along. This is most unmistakable on college campuses.
In a residential teach in Ajmer an old feudal competition between the Baniya and the Rajput clans could very likely take a threatening tone, regardless of the grades a devotee of either community may have got. Similarly Delhi University harbours in its go under simmering dispute between Jats and Dalit students, among other feudal streaks. Caste snobbishness is evident amid Muslim students too, as any old undergraduate of Aligarh Muslim University familiar with the lasting standoff between the perceptibly diffident Bihari students and the fortissimo and pushy Pathans from the Rohilkhand part of Uttar Pradesh would testify. I am told the Biharis have become more domineering now, as have the Dalits in Delhi.
Add an inbuilt gender predispose together with a homegrown xenophobia of other Indian cultures into the popular basket and you would have an explosive cocktail of violent and uncontrollable assertiveness. Road rage, sexual harassment, even rape, insensitivity close to ethnic minorities and vandalism is a trade mark of a new class of Indians. They have been let let go on the streets of big and small cities to dupe on their own fellow compatriots, their pockets bulging with wads of cash, their minds vacuously riveted to other ways of making more money.
About racism that lurks within, the ranking envoy of Nagaland recently complained how he was often asked if he was Nepali. Every state is mildly or unquestioningly racist. I am certain Australia has its pay out of the malaise. But I am now predisposed to listen to the other team of the story about the alleged racial attacks on Indians Down Under, outstandingly since this different interpretation comes from Indians who have lived in Australia for decades.
Let me give excerpts from two Indian story reports from Australia that type a fresh judgement on the prevailing problem of Indian students there. The maiden is a report from Sydney in The Hindu of July 5, by Anita Joshua. It is headlined: Attacks asunder Indians Down Under. The other is an critique by Roli Srivastava in The Times of India of June 29.
Datelined Melbourne/Sydney, this article is headlined: ‘Old’ Indians in Australia assert youngsters invite attacks.’ ‘The attacks on Indian students in Australia over the old times two months have chink the Indian community in the country,’ said The Hindu. ‘Broadly, the rank is between the deep-seated Indian community and the newcomers but it is so apparent that Australian authorities too remark on the disconnect. ‘The old-timers do not just iteration the government’s stated standing that the attacks are instances of ‘opportunistic crime’ and not racist in nature, but plainly happen door with the modus vivendi in which the green crop of students from the sub-continent have been conducting themselves. ‘The invocation of faults with the Indian students runs thus: ‘They deed around in their own linguistic groups and originate no effort to fraternize with the locals.
They speak loudly amongst themselves and on cellphones while on trains and in other social spaces. They parade around with flashy cellphones and iPods. They watch and pass lewd remarks. They are insolent and unwilling to adapt to Australian culture.’ ‘If Australians are smarting over the ‘racist’ tag, the Indian community is bristling and the gathering of journalists from India on a scourge sponsored by the Australian domination drew abuse for the media’s response to the attacks. ‘Some are fluster primarily because the media focal point on the issue – described as ‘curry-bashing’ centre of students - has singled them out in their own niggardly local communities.
Others feel that the intermittent attacks being reported in recent weeks were essentially a wrapper of ‘copycat crime’ as now Indians are being seen as calmly targets since they are reluctant to approach the police. Indians have obviously earned the description of being ATMs - dumbfound a few punches and you get money – on the whole because many students do not have debit cards and, therefore, hold up cash all the time. A give-away opinion in the Times of India’s account of the parable goes thus: ‘This visible divide between the late and old Indians in Australia is much like a day gap that cannot be bridged with the younger bunch of students saying that the older Indians here were ‘subservient’ to the pattern but since the remodelled generation grew in a free, republican India, they do not think twice before challenging the system.’ The Times says that throughout the squabble of avowed racial attacks, the Indian immigrant community kept its remoteness from the younger lot.
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