Student bashings strain Australia-India relations

AUSTRALIA: Indian students rallied in Melbourne on Sunday as Australia scrambled to contain outrage over a wave of attacks that has seen it labelled racist and strained diplomatic relations with New Delhi.

What began as a local policing issue in Australia's second largest city has spiralled into a crisis that prompted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to call his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh last week to assure him about student safety.

The students are demanding action after more than 70 assaults on their peers in a year in Melbourne, including at least four in the past fortnight, and there has been prominent coverage in newspapers here and in India.

Pictures from a hospital bed of a comatose Sravan Kumar Theerthala, who was stabbed with a screwdriver by gatecrashers at a party, were splashed across newspapers in India. A teenager has been charged with attempted murder.

"They were saying, 'Don't touch us you Indians' and 'Indians go home' before they got the screwdriver," said Theerthala's friend, Jayasanka Bagpelli.

Another student, Baljinder Singh, told Australian public radio last week how his attackers laughed as he pleaded with them during a robbery at a Melbourne train station.

"I was saying to them, 'I'm giving you all my money, don't kill me, don't kill me'," said Singh, who was stabbed and left with a six-inch (15-centimetre) wound to his stomach and advised Indians to stay away from Australia.

Indian media have dubbed the attacks "curry bashings", picking up on a term reportedly used by some of the youths behind the violence in Melbourne's western suburbs, where police say 30 percent of assault victims are Indian.

It is a grossly disproportionate figure in a city of almost four million people where the Indian student population numbers less than 50,000.

Police deny any racial element to the attacks, arguing Indian students were often simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as they travelled home late at night with items such as mobile phones and portable MP3 players.

But Indian High Commissioner to Australia Sujatha Singh said last week that racism was playing a part, even if some of the crimes were "opportunistic".

Federation of Indian Students president Amit Menghani, who led the rally of more than a thousand supporters through central Melbourne Sunday, said the police attitude had frustrated many students.

Melbourne, Sunday, AFP