Rampage Down Under: Why Indian Students are Soft Targets in Australia

In the past three months over 17 Indian students have been assaulted in Melbourne and Sydney in a pattern of crimes which have become infamously known as “curry bashing”. Since then the 95,000 strong Indian student community in Oz has suffered a disproportionate share of violent crimes. David Wightman reports from Canberra The best available evidence is grainy television footage captured by a CCTV camera inside a local train speeding through the neatly-landscaped city of Melbourne (pop. 3.9 million), Australia. In a world increasingly watching everyone’s movements, it depicts the nightmare of every Indian abroad — unprovoked assault and battery. Late at night on May 9, Sourabh Sharma, a 21-year-old student from Chandigarh pursuing a hospitality degree at a Melbourne college, was returning to his lodgings after working an evening shift at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the city. He was listening to the radio on his phone, minding his own business and carrying AUS$650 (Rs.25,000) in cash to pay his room rent and tuition fees. Five other young men were commuting in the rail car — three of them obscured by hooded sweatshirts. The footage depicts them talking to Sharma, who is almost invisible at first. Suddenly there is a flurry of movement and he comes into view, with the assailants raining blows on his prone body, punching and kicking him. One of the attackers rifles through Sharma’s backpack while the others continue to kick and thrash him, using the handrails and benches of the speeding train to balance themselves and give greater weight to their blows. Behind them the train rocks back and forth on its rails. Though there were other commuters in the coach, nobody came to Sharma’s rescue. In normal circumstances, the late night attack on this lone Indian student far from home would have been entered into the city’s crime records as a simple robbery. But circumstances are not normal for the growing number of Indian students lured by high-pitched advertising campaigns to acquire world-class English medium professional education in Australia at half the price of similar education in Britain and the US, traditional study destinations for the 100,000 Indians who cross the seas annually to study abroad. Sharma was not just another target of violence in Australia (pop. 22 million). In the past three months over 17 Indian students have been assaulted in Melbourne and Sydney in a pattern of crimes which have become infamously known as “curry bashing”.  Within a month of the attack on Sharma, Baljinder Singh, a 25-year-old student of the Australian Institute of Technology, Melbourne was stabbed with a screwdriver, as was Shravan Kumar, a student of Cambridge International College, while Rajesh Kumar, a hospitality degree student suffered 30 percent burns when a petrol bomb was hurled at him in Sydney. According to figures released by the police of Victoria — one of Australia’s six states and three territories — of which Melbourne is the administrative capital, its Indian student population is 46,000, of whom 1,447 have been victims of violent…