Indian students being murdered in Australia

[the_future_modernes]

Why are Indian students being attacked in Australia?


The Autralians are claiming that its not racism


In fact, one Tim Colbach, columnist for the The Age claims that Indian TV needs to stop whipping up hysteria because there are far more killings of Indians in India than in Australia, and India has dowry deaths too!! So let some common sense reign, eh? Kids? If you don't know what derailing is? There is a classic example. Indian blogger Madhavi brings the subject back on track



And then Mr. Colbach pulls out two instances of Australians murdered in India over a ten year period. You all do it too!!!


The interesting thing is, then why is it that coroners are hiding the cause of deaths for at least 51 foreign exchange students, more than half of which are Indian? Never mind that coroners were deliberately suppressing and under reporting murders. What I want to know is...What were the stats in 2009?

Comments

[jayeless_archive]

You make two good points:

1. it is likely that many of the attacks are partly motivated by racism
2. Australian statistics should actually make clear how many students are murdered, rather than saying they died of "unknown causes"

That's about it. For instance, Soutik Biswas, whose article you linked to right at the beginning, describes Indian TV's reaction as having gone "ballistic" -- that's hardly a justification for it. You are wrong to say "FIFTY ONE foreign exchange students, nearly HALF of them Indians, were killed". The page you linked to doesn't say that at all. 51 students died in Australia -- three of illness, fourteen of accidents, and the remainder (34) of "unknown causes". Perhaps all of those 34 are murders. Perhaps some are murders, some are suicides, and some deaths are genuinely mysterious. Not revealing the answers only lets people think that 34 foreign students were killed, which is why I wish they had been open about it.

I notice you have also not pointed out that there were 97,035 Indians studying at our universities in 2008. 25 deaths (the largest number still almost half of 51) is a death rate of 0.025% among Indian students here. That's not even the number of Indian students murdered, since we don't know how many Indian students were murdered, only that 25 died. For instance, three were killed in a house fire on January 3, 2008. That's at least three who died in an accident...

I also don't see how Tim Colebatch is derailing anything. He didn't go off on a tangent halfway through -- his argument was, throughout, that murder is abhorrent whether or not it happens in India or Australia, and that many more murders happen in India than here, even adjusted for population. He talks about how Indian TV have gone hysterical (an assessment with which Soutik Biswas seems to agree, remember). What's the issue?

Madhavi, on the other hand, writes his entire entry assuming Australians are offended by the Indian Government's actions. Ummm, no. Australians are offended that the Indian media (and India is not China, so the media is not the government) is making absurd exaggerations about how racist and KKK-like we are. Obviously giving advice to Indian students about how to improve their safety isn't wrong. He didn't bring the subject "back on track" at all; he started talking about some imaginary situation that doesn't exist. In talking about Indian newsrooms, I think Colebatch is far closer to the crux of the issue.

I think it's fairly obvious that the Indian media is exaggerating and sensationalising everything to increase consumption of their product. Victoria Police is not the Ku Klux Klan. If I were a police officer, especially if I were in the team investigating Nitin Garg's death, I would be incredibly upset by that. Either the Indian media is trying to make out the KKK weren't all that bad, or else they're trying to make out that Australia is one of the most racist nations on Earth, or perhaps a combination of both. Either way, I am offended.

Australia is not a racist nation. There is a small minority of people who are racist, and there are a small minority of people who are thugs, and most thugs are also racists. In reality, Australia is a multicultural society which is generally tolerant of other cultures. Freely available statistics from the Bureau of Statistics say that, in 2006, that 31.9% of Melburnians spoke a language other than English at home, and between 31% and 39% of Melbourne's population was of non-Western European descent. The number of responses describing non-European ancestry was 689,272, or 19% of Melbourne's population. Due to high immigration in the past few years, raising Melbourne's population over 4 million, I'd say those percentages are higher now. We will see in the 2011 Census, I guess.

And I won't deny that Australia has some racist people in it, but just like Germany is not a nation of neo-Nazis, Australia is not a nation of racists. It's wrong to generalise in such an extreme way, and it becomes offensive when people then exaggerate their gross generalisations and declare that Victoria Police are the neo-KKK. Even in a cartoon.

[the_future_modernes]

This si a very late reply, but: Thank your for the corrections with the article. With regards to Mr. Colbach's basic argument that since Indians kill Indians so why are they screaming when Australians kill Indians!! rhetoric, the problem is this: if a group with less power is saying that a group with more power is killing their members based on their race...the response of the majority group should be really? how can we stop it? Not stop complaining, you all kill your amongst yourselves anyway. That is why I consider it derailing. The onus is moved back unto the oppressed, which tends to give the oppressor a freer hand to ignore or downplay the concern of the less powerful. Which is precisely what that kind of rhetoric is for, of course. As for your contention that Australia is not a racist country...well. I think you will find that a great many people who are not white would disagree most strongly with you. In denial over a deep vein of hate.