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Report of the Australia-India Institute - Beyond the Lost Decade

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Report of theAustralia India Institute

Perceptions Taskforce

Beyond the Lost Decade

John McCarthy, AOSanjaya Baru

Gopalaswami ParthasarathyMaxine McKew

Ashok MalikChristopher Kremmer

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�e Australia India Institute is funded by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education formerly known as the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Copyright: Australia India Institute 2012ISBN: 978-0-9872398-3-9


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John McCarthy, AO

Sanjaya Baru

Gopalaswami Parthasarathy

Maxine McKew

Ashok Malik

Christopher Kremmer

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The views, findings and recommendations of this report are the edited product of the collective deliberation of a group of independent analysts. The report does not represent the views of the

Australia India Institute. Neither should it be read as reflecting the views of specific participants, authors and/or the institutions with which they are affiliated on issues canvassed in the report.


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Contents

From the Director

Taskforce Members

Executive Summary

An Indian Perspective

An Australian Perspective

Recommendations

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From the Director of the Australia India InstituteIn the three years since it began work, the Australia India Institute has quickly established itself as an important centre for the study of India and hub for dialogue and research partnerships between India and Australia. Based at the University of Melbourne, the Institute hosts a growing range of programs that are deepening and enriching the relationship between our two great democracies.

What is the state of relations between Australia and India? How do the two peoples and nations view one another, and how are these perceptions being formed in the era of rapid, global communications? In recent years, unforseen problems have strained relations. What have these conflicts taught us about ourselves and how we view each other? And what practical steps can stakeholders take to ensure that public debates around the relationship are better informed, less emotive and more focused on the key issues of concern to our two nations and peoples?

In September 2011, the Australia India Institute’s Perceptions Taskforce was formed to provide answers to these questions and make recommendations on how to respond to the challenges. The taskforce brought together Indians and Australians with decades of experience in diplomacy, public policy and media. On December 4, 2011, the six taskforce members met in Kolkata to share their views against the backdrop of major economic and geopolitical shifts in the Indo-Pacific region as we enter what Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has called ‘The Asian Century’.

This report, Beyond the Lost Decade, discusses the key issues arising from this process and presents them from Indian and Australian viewpoints. It draws conclusions and proposes recommendations for action that the Taskforce members believe will create more robust Australia-India ties. The problems of the past reflected our different histories and social and political realities. But our interests are converging and people-to-people ties and economic and security cooperation will grow. At times provocative, but always insightful, this report is a must-read, not just for policy-makers, but anyone with a stake in closer relations between Australia and its Asian neighbours, especially India.

Amitabh Mattoo


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The Australia India Institute’s Perceptions Taskforce MembersDr. Sanjaya Baru is the Director for Geo-economics and Strategy, International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) London. Prior to his appointment he served as media adviser to the Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh (2004-08). Dr Baru is a former Editor of Business Standard newspaper (2009-11), and Chief Editor of The Financial Express (2000-04).He has also held professorships in economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (1985-86) and the University of Hyderabad (1979-1990), and has been a member of the National Security Advisory Board of India (1998-2001) and the India-ASEAN Eminent Persons Group (2011-12). His publications include Strategic Consequences of India’s Economic Performance (Routledge, 2006) and The Political Economy of Indian Sugar (Oxford University Press, 1990).

Maxine McKew is a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow with the University of Melbourne and works as an advisor on education for the not-for-profit group Social Ventures Australia. After a long career in broadcast and print journalism, she was elected to Australia’s Federal Parliament in 2007, defeating the sitting Prime Minister John Howard in his own seat of Bennelong. Maxine served in the Rudd Labor Government (2007-2010) as Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood, and later as Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Regional Development and Local Government.

Gopalaswami Parthasarathy is Visiting Professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. As a long serving and distinguished diplomat he served as Ambassador of India to Myanmar (1992-95), and as High Commissioner to Australia (1995-98), Pakistan (1998-2000) and Cyprus (1990-92). He also served as Spokesman, Ministry of External Affairs, and Information Adviser and Spokesman in the Prime Minister’s under the late Rajiv Gandhi (1985-90). He is the co-author with ex-Pakistan Foreign Secretary, Dr. Humayun Khan of Diplomatic Divide, a book which explores the issues that divide India and Pakistan.

John McCarthy, AO is national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He has served as Australia’s Ambassador to Vietnam (1981-83), Mexico (1985-87), Thailand (1992-94), the United States (1995 to 1997), Indonesia (1997-2001) and Japan (2001-2004). He has also served in Damascus, Baghdad and Vientiane, and as High Commissioner to India in 2004-2009. From 1994-95, he was Deputy Secretary in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra. He holds a Masters degree in Arts and a Bachelor of Law, and is a barrister-at-law. Mr McCarthy is now Chair of the Australia-India Council and Co-convener of the Australia India Dialogue.

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Ashok Malik is a columnist who writes for leading Indian and international publications including the Times of India, Hindustan Times, Tehelka and YaleGlobal Online. He focuses on Indian domestic politics and foreign policy, and their increasing interplay. He was co-author with Rory Medcalf of a paper, India’s New World: Civil Society in the Making of Foreign Policy, published by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney. His book, India: Spirit of Enterprise, encapsulating the story of the growth of India’s leading private sector industries and their role in the Indian economy, was published in 2012.

Christopher Kremmer is the author of four books on the history, politics and culture of modern Asia including The Carpet Wars, Bamboo Palace, and his personal history of India, Inhaling the Mahatma. A former foreign correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age, he served two terms in New Delhi (1990-93 and 1997-2011) and also in Hanoi (1993-95). He contributes to The Monthly magazine, and teaches Communications Law and Ethics at the University of Western Sydney, where he is currently completing his doctorate.


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Executive SummaryAfter a lost decade of nagging tensions and bad publicity from 2001 to 2011 the Australia-India relationship is on the mend. Recent research suggests a dramatic improvement in perceptions of Australia in India since concerns about the safety of Indian students triggered a media firestorm in 2009-10. Indians once again rank Australia as a top ten country; a well governed, business, tourist and student-friendly destination, researchers say. Yet the relationship remains brittle, and bold initiatives are needed to consolidate progress and chart a course towards deeper ties.

Three factors underpin optimism: India’s growing demand for energy, and Australia’s capacity to provide it; the rise of China, which encourages both nations to protect their interests by consulting more closely on regional security issues; and Australian efforts to reform its international student program to avoid a repeat of recent quality and security issues. Yet the Taskforce warns that initiatives taken to date fall short of those required to convince Indians that Australia means business, while Australian stakeholders lack confidence in India’s capacity to progress ties rapidly.

New measures to build trust and improve perceptions of each other in the fields of education, diplomacy, media and security are called for. They include:

• Doubling the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s public diplomacy budget to A$10 million per annum; The overseas television broadcaster Australia Network to retain close links with DFAT but funding and editorial responsibility should rest with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

• A new Indo-Pacific or Australasia Division within India’s Ministry of External Affairs as part of an expedited restructure of the ministry.

• Extending post-study work rights to international students enrolled in courses at TAFE institutes and other reputable vocational training establishments, the sector in which most Indian students have traditionally enrolled.

• Training Australian school teachers in the Hindi language in anticipation of it being added to the Australian Curriculum before the end of this decade.

• As an act of goodwill, extending to December 2013 the visas of Indian students caught up in changes to regulations following the student crisis of 2009; and tasking the Australian Institute of Criminology to undertake more

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research into racism and crime, including the events that affected Indian students in 2009-10.

• An Australian education rating system for States that provide education services to international students which can downgrade states that fail to provide proper security and education standards for international students.

• Invitations to representatives of Indian Army regiments that fought at Gallipoli to participate in Australian commemoration ceremonies to mark the 100th anniversary of the campaign in 2015.

• An Australia-India senior editors’ dialogue, and the Press Trust of India to consider posting a permanent correspondent in Australia.

• Permanent naval attaché positions to be established in both capitals.

• Regular institutionalised Prime Ministerial visits between New Delhi and Canberra and a young political leaders program between India and Australia.

• Visas on arrival for some Australian travellers to India as currently permitted to citizens of New Zealand.

• A one-stop shop online portal serving all aspects of trade, diplomatic, educational, people-to-people and cultural relations between Australia and India.

Australia’s High Commissioner to India, Peter Varghese, believes relations have improved since trade and non-proliferation differences “soured a generation of Australian and Indian diplomats towards each other”. But high ranking former Indian officials say entrenched resentments and negative perceptions – though well past their use-by dates – also continue to hinder improved defence co-operation. The Taskforce calls for strong political leadership to balance any such outdated thinking in both capitals. Negotiations on bilateral free trade, defence ties and nuclear safeguards agreements should be prioritised and expedited as a litmus test of the ability of officials and negotiators on both sides to transcend old enmities and serve the interests of their nations.

Australia needs to do more than just persuade Indians that it’s a great place to live, work, study and play; it also needs to combat ignorance and negative perceptions of India in Australia. State and Federal education authorities must urgently address their failure to adequately educate school students in the history, economy, languages and cultures of the emerging superpower that is India. Australia and India are very different nations, but their peoples’ common interests are growing. With political will, public education, and a more ambitious concept of the role that awaits both countries in the Indo-Pacific region, we can and should become reliable partners and good friends.


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Frankness hurts often enough, but it is almost always desirable, especially between those who have to work together. - Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister1

1 Letter to Sarat Chandra Bose, 24 March 1939 quoted in Jawaharlal Nehru. Thoughts (ed. Rajiv

Gandhi). Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund. New Delhi. 1985

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An Indian PerspectiveIn any Indian gathering, when the word ‘Australia’ is brought up as a place name or even a concept, the immediate or at least inevitable identification is with cricket. At some point every discussion – whatever its theme, whether politics, trade or uranium sales – will break into a discursive debate on relative styles of playing a game both countries cherish; the ‘Australian way of cricket’; the aggression and the sledging and the mental disintegration; the Indian worship of Bradman, admiration of Lillee and unbridled affection for Steve Waugh and Adam Gilchrist.

The talk about cricket can be seductive and it can be tiresome. After the initial self-congratulation about a common cultural benchmark, serious interlocutors – hardnosed diplomats, crusty scholars and get-to-the-point businessmen – are left impatient and even frustrated. Can the Indo-Australian relationship, or any public diplomacy effort in which the two nations are involved, ever have meaningful content beyond the admittedly well-watched, lucrative, and advertiser-friendly bilateral contests in the game of cricket?

No doubt cricket has its uses. It affords Australia a name recognition that is astonishing in a country and a subcontinent most of whose 1.2 billion people are remarkably self-absorbed, with only a fleeting interest in the rest of the planet. In 2009, as violent acts against individual Indian students in Australia seemed to acquire a larger meaning for Indian media and middle class opinion, it was to well-recognised cricketers that Australian authorities turned to promote friendship between the two nations. Far from being a deterrent to advancement in other areas, the fact that its top cricketers were Australia’s most identifiable faces in India was acknowledged as an opportunity in this narrow context. Yet the absolute identification in popular Indian reckoning of Australia with its cricket team is also somehow a telling commentary on how differently the two countries perceive the same phenomenon – or indeed perceive Australia.

In the 40 years since the White Australia policy was abrogated and particularly since the 1990s, Australia has moved closer and closer to Asia. It sees itself as a part of Asia (or Greater Asia or the Asia-Pacific region). It stresses its Asian identity and commercial and increasingly social and cultural relationships with Asian countries, and promotes its growing cultural heterogeneity, and the fact that cities as far apart as Sydney and Darwin reveal such a plethora of Asian faces as you walk down the street. Indeed, Australia wears its multiculturalism – a multiculturalism that has added a strong Asian layer to a predominantly European-origin identity – as a badge of pride.

However, this is far from the first image that Indians who have never experienced Australia – including educated Indians and those in positions of authority in government, business and academia – have of ‘the land down under’. They are


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innocent of its multiculturalism, look upon its emphasis on its Asian-ness with bemusement and some incredulity and wonder what the fuss is about.

As it happens, their window to Australia is the one Australian national institution that is the least multicultural and most prone to promoting an older, even outdated idea of the country: its cricket team. With a few exceptions, Australian cricket remains largely an Anglo-Celtic preserve. When Indians superimpose the idea of the cricket team on the rest of Australia, they obviously see a very different country and society from the one that Australians themselves see, live and experience.

While it would be too much to say that cricket defines all Indian attitudes to Australia, from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to other public agencies, it does offer a sense of the challenge Canberra faces in New Delhi. Though it is never expressed openly, there is an instinctive uncertainty among the Indian establishment as to where Australia fits in Asia.

India’s Look East policy enlarged New Delhi’s strategic focus from its own immediate neighbourhood to embrace East and Southeast Asia, Japan and even South Korea. But it seems—if not in theory, then at least in practice—to stop tantalisingly short of Australia. Tellingly, Indian Prime Ministers make regular and multiple visits to East and Southeast Asia but have not visited Australia since 1986. Various reasons and scheduling problems have been cited. The general election of 2004 was brought forward by more than six months, leading to the postponement – the indefinite postponement, as it turned out – of a visit planned for that year. If India had felt that a Canberra summit was imperative, it would have happened.

For all the good words, India is still unsure of Australia’s place in New Delhi’s construct of Asia. Like its cricket team, Australia itself is seen as a western outpost in a strange geography. At the street level this may lead to ethnic stereotyping. In more informed and sophisticated intellectual and policy circles, it causes the Indian elite to discount Australia’s autonomy of action – and impinges on the recognition of, and need to build, a purely bilateral dynamic. While this is not the entirety of the Indian perception of Australia, it is a fairly fundamental parameter. It distinguishes New Delhi from other capitals such as Tokyo, Jakarta, Beijing and Seoul, the strategic and economic maps of which mark Canberra far more definitely as a regional actor.

South Block looks Down Under

Part of the reason Australia doesn’t get the attention from India’s Ministry of External Affairs that it believes it deserves is a matter of capacity. The Indian Foreign Service (IFS), comprising the country’s elite corps of diplomats, has just over 600 serving officers. They represent a country of 1.2 billion people in close to 200 countries and a variety of multilateral agencies, from the United Nation

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to the World Trade Organization, straddling political, business, social and diaspora duties.

The number is just not enough. To give an example, the geographical division of the MEA that covers Australia actually has 25 other nations as part of its mandate. This division – the Southern Division – is run by a single senior IFS officer of the rank of joint secretary in New Delhi, with a handful of junior and freshman officers to assist him. Admittedly, India is beginning to expand its Foreign Service and numbers should rise to at least about 1,500 over the coming decade.

Given such constraints there simply isn’t enough time for desk hands in the foreign office to prioritise policy innovations or invest intellectual capital in long-term strategy formation. This remains one of the handicaps of the MEA as a whole and particularly of the Southern Division, which is one of its largest, covering a vast swathe of territory east of Myanmar/Burma, stretching from Thailand to Fiji. Australia is at the tail-end of this geography, and so often of mind-space as well.

Some of the problem is, of course, generic and not limited to Australia. Several diplomatic interlocutors, across countries and continents, complain the MEA does not have enough time or human resources to do justice to bilateral relationships and to India’s rise. “Because the individual joint secretary or Foreign Service officer may be doing so many things,” says a diplomat in New Delhi, “His instinct is to stall, delay and say ‘no’. The government has not changed as other parts of Indian society have.”

On the other hand the MEA is jealous of its gatekeeper role. Requests for interactions with wings and agencies of the government have to be routed through the MEA to a far greater degree, many diplomats argue, than in several other major countries, where such clearances are routine. In 2011-12, for example, it took the Australian coast guard seven months of urging the MEA to get permission to interact with the Indian Coast Guard. Such behaviour is not necessarily symbolic of a Fortress India or hostile attitude on the part of the MEA – though it may sometimes be interpreted thus – but more a result of severe under-capacity and under-resourcing in the Indian system. Either way, it translates to a lack of will.

Like many other foreign ministries in the world, the MEA also has a long and sometimes stubborn institutional memory. Given its capacity constraints and the unenviably busy desk of the average Indian diplomat, the MEA often falls back on this institutional memory in taking decisions – or not taking decisions – in relation to a particular country, region or issue. In the context of Australia, this means that the oppositional relationship during the Cold War, the history of false starts since the early 1990s and memories of the strong and overdone reaction in Canberra to the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998, are still remembered and cited


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– even if as part of a defensive manoeuvre – and still impinge upon 21st century bilateralism. Some of the remembrances are genuine; others are apocryphal, but have acquired overwhelming weight by virtue of repeated iteration. Interestingly India has overcome similar impinging factors in some of its other bilateral relationships, but Australia has not been given the requisite political importance.

Few phrases have gained as much currency in Indian foreign policy thinking – and consequently, so thwarted the quest for a robust and clear-headed Canberra-New Delhi bilateralism – as the expression ‘deputy sheriff ’. Coined by an enthusiastic journalist in 1999 to describe Australia’s support for United States leadership in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific, this flippant term acquired a deeper meaning in South Block, seat of the MEA in the heart of the Indian capital. It confirmed long-standing Indian perceptions that Australia was not quite an independent actor. As a former Indian High Commissioner to Australia put it, “If you deal with the Americans, you deal with Australia. The America relationship holds the key.”

To quite an extent that ‘deputy sheriff ’ syndrome is past its sell-by date. Yet the perception is hard to shake off. The announcement of a larger American naval presence in Darwin (Northern Territory) in 2011, when President Barack Obama visited Australia, was to many in the foreign policy establishment only further confirmation that Canberra was a willing and devoted junior partner to Washington’s mission to secure its supremacy in Asia and rein in China, or at least pre-empt any possible Chinese adventurism. So entrenched is this idea that nothing seems to wipe it off.

Few Australian politicians in recent times have commanded the sort of respect in India as did John Howard, Prime Minister from 1996 to 2007. In the second half of his term, Howard’s stocks rose in New Delhi, despite the nuclear tests overreaction in 1998 and the ‘deputy sheriff ’ catchphrase. For while Indian diplomats liked to chide Australia for being too close to the United States, they themselves moved closer to Washington after 9/11. In the new context, Howard’s former liability—his unflinching identification with American security concerns in Asia –became his asset, at a time when two successive Indian Prime Ministers (Atal Bihari Vajpayee, till 2004, and Manmohan Singh after that) forged strong links with the Bush administration.

Howard’s Labor successor, Kevin Rudd, who came to power in 2007, did not fare so well. The Mandarin-speaking Rudd’s flurry of China-centric diplomacy was widely seen as a move away from total support for American foreign policy towards an Australian role as honest broker between the West and Beijing.

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However, Rudd’s gambit made India wary to the point of suspicion, encouraging the belief that Australia could consider being part of an Asian arrangement that excluded India, or that was even adversarial to it. In the event, the Rudd-Beijing honeymoon did not last – some would argue it never began at all, but that is another matter – and India was reassured when it ended.

In reality, as India’s own relationship with the United States had begun to improve at the turn of the millennium, old postulates seemed to matter less and less. A strong security and strategic approach to the United States automatically made Australia a potential ally, albeit not necessarily a self-propelled actor. Similarly, in 1992, when India and Israel exchanged ambassadors for the first time, Israel was seen as an American ally in West Asia and expectations of a strategic relationship were unclear. Yet today Israel represents one of India’s most important bilateral partners, among its strongest allies in West Asia and one of its two biggest sources of military hardware. Indeed, the India-Israel equation now has an energy of its own, completely unrelated to the US. Even if one or both of the countries develops a temporarily testy relationship with one or the other administration in Washington, it is extremely unlikely to affect the bilateral understanding.

Is there a template here for Australia? The one critical difference is that the Indian policy elite sees Israel as being – even in the period of India’s boycott of the Jewish state, overt patronage of the Palestinian cause, and assiduous courtship of the Arab world – steadfastly sympathetic to India’s broader security and strategic concerns. It is a loyalty, or at least a record of good conduct, that won appreciation in New Delhi and earned Tel Aviv a strong constituency in the Indian capital.

In contrast Australia has been regarded as erratic. In the post-Cold War period, there was an ambitious attempt at naval and maritime security cooperation in the early 1990s. Even so, in May 1998, when India conducted a series of nuclear tests in Pokhran, the fledgling defence relationship was dealt a blow. Indian military officers sent to Australia’s Defence Staff College for training programmes were expelled; in one case just days after an officer had arrived and incurred considerable personal expense in settling his family into a new home in an unfamiliar country. The military attaché in the Indian High Commission in Canberra was asked to leave at once and his counterpart in New Delhi was recalled. India retaliated by banning port visits of Australian military ships and air passage to military aircraft. The Australian High Commission’s access to the upper echelons of the Indian government and the MEA was also curtailed. In February 1999, Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer travelled to New Delhi to re-build bridges, but was denied a meeting with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian Prime Minister.

Australia had clearly miscalculated. Its overreaction to the nuclear tests was largely explained by domestic political concerns and a feeling in the country that


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the government in Canberra had been mild in its response to a series of French nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1995. That was in Australia’s backyard. Pokhran was a long way off and India’s nuclear program didn’t even remotely threaten Australia. As such, there was genuine puzzlement and then anger in New Delhi about what was interpreted as an overbearing reaction. Australia joined several powers in excoriating India after the tests but one by one the others made up, with India and the US commencing a dialogue on a gamut of issues that eventually transformed their relationship. Australia was left out in the cold. The aftermath of Pokhran has not been forgotten in New Delhi and is often brought up as a sample of Australian impetuousness. Indian diplomats say resentment in India’s defence establishment over those incidents continues to generate negative perceptions of Australia to this day.

Memories of the Pokhran episode came right back in 2008 when Australia withdrew from the security dialogue of the Quadrilateral countries. The Quadrilateral (or “Quad”) comprised the naval first-responders following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004: India, Australia, Japan and the United States. These were the four democracies with the biggest naval and humanitarian action capacities in the region. They coordinated their efforts when the tsunami devastated communities in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and other countries. Encouraged by Japan – and not discouraged by the other three – the Quad began to move gingerly towards institutionalising a security and naval relationship.

All four countries were to some extent worried about being accused by Beijing of ganging up against China. India, for instance, would have preferred a gradualist approach, focusing on natural disaster relief and similar areas, rather than anything suggestive of a military umbrella. But it was Australia that chose to pull the stumps. In February 2008, standing beside the Chinese foreign minister, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told the media the Rudd government was walking out of the Quad dialogue. The political and civil service leadership at the MEA in New Delhi was decidedly upset at not so much the withdrawal as the semiotics of the announcement and what was described in private as “immature diplomacy” on the part of the then-new Rudd government. Rudd was interpreted as being more pro-Chinese and even subservient to Beijing than subsequent events (and the Wikileaks revelations) seemed to point out. Nevertheless, as in the Pokhran case of a decade earlier, the Australia-sceptics in New Delhi found it persuasive enough to raise doubts about Canberra’s essential reliability. Both examples are still brought up by Indian interlocutors, whether as bargaining chips, or to win time and explain away their inability to push through some long-delayed and needed action – or simply because bitter memories die hard.

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Cultures of diplomacy

India’s MEA and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) are two foreign ministries divided by the same calling: diplomacy. The difference is apparent in the nomenclature itself. DFAT combines commerce and traditional diplomacy and sees trade promotion as essential to its charter. The MEA has historically not practised economic diplomacy and has begun seeing itself as an adjunct to Indian business and trade only relatively recently. There is still a section of the MEA – and it is not necessarily limited to an older generation – that is culturally uncomfortable discussing specific business deals. “There is a perception in the MEA,” says an Indian diplomat, “that Australian foreign policy is unduly mercantilist.”

Old-timers in the MEA still speak of the visit of K.R. Narayanan to Australia in 1994, when he was India’s vice-president. A respected, scholarly figure, Narayanan, who later became India’s first president from the Dalit (formerly Untouchable) community, had served in the Foreign Service and in fact been posted in Australia as a young officer. He had affection for the country but was, surprisingly to the Indians, refused a meeting with Prime Minister Paul Keating, apparently on the advice of DFAT. Eventually, Indian diplomats had to use the good offices of a person of Indian origin, residing in Australia and known socially to Keating, to get the Australian Prime Minister to agree to a 15-minute appointment. The meeting eventually lasted an hour, an indication perhaps of how DFAT officials had misjudged its potential and the political leadership’s interest in India.

Another cabinet minister who met Narayanan in 1994 was Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. According to an MEA official, Evans spoke “incessantly of trade and liberalisation and market access”. In doing so, the Foreign minister - who in fact placed some emphasis during his term on improving relations with India -was merely conveying the interests and priorities of the Australian government at that time. But Narayanan, a reserved man for whom economics was not a primary motivation, is said to have retorted: “Is India important only because of trade?” A visit that could have achieved a lot only ended up ossifying mutual suspicions and misgivings between bureaucracies of the MEA and DFAT.

This is a window to a wider issue. There is a mismatch in terms of not just diplomatic priorities, but also political and public diplomacy styles. Indian diplomats and ministers, like many other Asians, tend to be understated to the point of obfuscation and not demonstrative in public. The Australian way is a more informal one and language can be used loosely. The subtlety of diplomatic intercourse that the MEA prides itself on – on occasion even making a fetish of it – is, it is felt, more sensitively assimilated by the Americans or the British than the Australians.


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Public spats inadvertently end up conveying a picture of the pushy Aussie – a strong statement following the arrest of an Australian citizen accused of paedophilia in New Delhi; the (to the Indian mind) crude references to revenue earnings for Australia courtesy of Indian students through the anti-student violence controversy of 2009; the overzealous detention of Muhamed Haneef, an Indian doctor, in Brisbane in July 2007 on charges of abetting terrorism, and the denial of any presumption of innocence in this case. Haneef was proven completely innocent and his visa eventually returned to him after a long court battle. Nevertheless the initial damage had been done. To Indian diplomats, this amounted to not just Australian prickliness but also an unwillingness to appreciate that the MEA was as answerable to domestic public opinion about the unfair treatment of a citizen overseas as DFAT was in case of an Australian national.

Patrolling the Asian waters

India and Australia are at two ends of the eastern Indian Ocean. Maritime security and naval-based humanitarian relief operations in the extensive waters between these two land masses would seem a natural point of convergence. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami triggered a response that saw India and Australia (and Japan and the US) combine naval forces to form a “core group” of first responders. In 2007, these four countries and Singapore sent their navies to a 25-ship joint exercise in the Bay of Bengal: Exercise Malabar. The following year Australia dropped out.

Exercise Malabar has continued as essentially an annual India-US war game. The Australians have made an attempt to re-enter the process but have been thwarted partly because India seemed to find a series of excuses – the treatment of naval officers in Australia after the Pokhran tests, the uranium issue, the Indian students’ affair – to postpone a decision.

The questions that overhang the prospect of India-Australia maritime security cooperation go well beyond the Indian penchant to trot up ancillary and sometimes non sequitur inhibitive factors, however. Both Australia and India recognise that the US naval presence in the region – which has been a security guarantor for the two countries, as well as for many other nations in maritime Asia –will decline in the coming years. Others will have to step in to fill the breach, collectively or alone.

Canberra and New Delhi are preparing for this in their own ways. Australia has historically invested its naval capacities in the relatively placid east, in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne. Its navy has to shift its gaze 180o. The establishment of a US naval presence in Darwin, in Australia’s northwest, will inevitably require

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the Australian Navy itself to focus on capacity enhancement in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and become more of an Indian Ocean power than a Pacific one. For its part, the Indian Navy has ordered 42 warships to be delivered in roughly the next five years, and senior naval officers have asked the government for permission to augment fleet strength by a further 80 warships when funding is made available.

If the hardware plans are ambitious, so is the geography. Australian and American strategic thinkers have sought to interest India in the Indo-Pacific, the confluence of the eastern Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, and are advocating seeing the two water bodies as one continuum. The idea appeals to India but the timing does not. While India sees its Indo-Pacific role as probable at some point in the 21st century, it does not want to be dragged into any such arrangement before it can develop the economic might, the naval fleet and the power-projection capacities to deliver on its promises. It is also wary of putting all its eggs in the American basket. Finally, there is for the moment no political ownership, overarching doctrine or grand strategy in New Delhi for a deep Indian Ocean thrust. India still awaits a political/foreign policy leadership that will expand the contours of the Look East policy and explicitly define India’s strategic frontiers and interests in the Indian Ocean (or Indo-Pacific). The political system is not ready for that yet.

India’s navy has traditionally been uncomfortable with interoperability proposals and would react with characteristic wariness to such invitations from, say, Australia and the US. It is conscious that it does not want to be a very junior, relatively under-powered partner in a larger multinational fleet or naval arrangement. The Indian approach is more on the lines of building smaller alliances in specific regions of the Indian Ocean and its near-neighbourhood and hoping the sum of the parts will give it a heft that is greater than the whole. Take some examples. India is one of three countries – Australia and the US are the others – with which Japan has signed a security treaty. Technologically, the Japanese Navy is perhaps the best equipped in Asia. In December 2011, when he arrived on a visit to New Delhi, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda announced a willingness in principle to export military and dual-use equipment for the first time since World War II. India was offered the ShinMaywa US-2 amphibious aircraft, with air-sea rescue capabilities useful in humanitarian situations as well military ones. Of course, it will be years before any deals actually take place.

If India and Japan share concerns related to the Straits of Malacca, India and Vietnam are potential partners in the South China Sea. However, India is ambiguous as to how far it will go should this needle China, and the Vietnamese recognise that the Americans are a more efficacious and dependable naval ally for now. An exposition of what India wants to do with these mini-partnerships came at the Male summit of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) of 2011, where it agreed to joint naval exercises and


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regional maritime cooperation with Sri Lanka and the Maldives. In the near-term, this template could test all of India’s oceanic potentialities and desires: a slow move towards inter-operability; battling piracy in, say, the environs of Somalia at the western edge of the Indian Ocean; exploring the notion of naval bases elsewhere; putting sustained joint patrolling mechanisms into operation.

In the near-term India is likely to hold back from a bilateral or three-way (with the US as the third prong) naval arrangement with Australia. Paradoxically, while the aim of its naval strategies is to build an alternative matrix to China, New Delhi would not want to give Beijing the impression that it is walking into anything that even remotely resembles a containment arc. It would prefer to make indirect efforts to whittle away at China’s claim of a monopoly on the South China Sea, and agree with Australia – as it often has in public – about the freedom of navigation in maritime areas. Yet it will stop there, at least in the medium run.

Any Australian incorporation of India into a naval treaty or similar agreement will work better if it comes as part of a (perhaps already existing) multilateral grouping. A maritime dialogue that also involves Japan, a Commonwealth naval initiative, joint exercises with ASEAN countries such as Indonesia and Singapore – all of these will give the Indian political leadership a comforting feeling. In 2009, Australia attempted to get India and Indonesia involved in a similar trilateral dialogue and exercises. Jakarta agreed but New Delhi did not. Yet, the idea could still be revived, perhaps frontloaded with disaster relief, capacity building and what an Indian diplomat calls the ‘soft stuff ’, with the military component coming later.

At the level of the Indian defence forces, there is still residual distrust of Australia’s military. Pokhran 1998 keeps being brought up, of course, but so too is surveillance by Australia’s P-3C Orion maritime aircraft of Indian naval ships in the Andaman seas, a practice which ended in the 1990s. The US Navy discontinued such Cold War era surveillance years earlier, so, as with the Pokhran nuclear tests, Australian policy lagged behind that of its ally and it bore the brunt of Indian displeasure alone. Such discontent tends to linger on among Indian officials, partly because ties with Canberra are less critical to New Delhi than those with Washington, DC.

It may be politically prudent to front-end Indo-Australian naval cooperation with disaster preparedness and management and humanitarian relief synergy building. The period after the tsunami of 2004 has been one of unusual (or unusually noticed) seismic activity in the seas of Asia. Climate change is also going to increase the vulnerability of many island or sea-facing nations in the Indian Ocean and its periphery. Whether they like it or not, India and Australia

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will be called upon to use their navies and disaster-relief capacities increasingly in the coming decades. To what degree can they synergise their efforts?

In India, there are the limitations of capacity and fears of overreach. New Delhi is reluctant—with a handful of exceptions--to send disaster relief ships to nations east of Sri Lanka or south of the Maldives. However, during the tsunami, Indian ships did rush to provide aid to Indonesia. It is entirely possible that Indian relief and rescue flotillas may someday venture a long way into the Indian Ocean. It would be worth exploring the possibility of a strictly peaceful-use, purely humanitarian aid directed naval association under the rubric of the Commonwealth, with the bigger naval powers dividing responsibilities between them and promising first-responder help to smaller Commonwealth countries. In the Indian Ocean region, Australia and India would be the obvious leaders. Such a proposal would create the option of naval cooperation without giving an explicitly military dimension to it. Using an umbrella such as the Commonwealth would serve several purposes. Indian and Australian leadership would brand the initiative as genuinely local, not part of superpower rivalries. It would allow India and Australia to introduce their navies and defence cultures to each other independent of a third power, and draw in the smaller Indian Ocean states in a way the risk-averse Indian establishment could tolerate.

All in all, Indian and Australian defence and naval cooperation – the fleshing out of the strategic partnership that has already been agreed upon – is almost a certainty this century. The key is Canberra’s ability to keep its patience, and nudge India towards advance without pushing it too much or too quickly. India is the elephant, it moves slowly but surely. The Australian kangaroo, in contrast, is nimble and hops much more quickly. One day they will meet. The time till then can be compressed, but given the way India thinks and works, it cannot entirely be wished away.

The prism of commerce

At the simplest, most basic level, India has a resource and energy deficit per capita and Australia has a resource and energy surplus per capita. The symbiosis is patently obvious. In both countries, coal is the main source of electricity, but the demographic pressures driving energy demand are profoundly different. The average Australian uses 20 times more electricity than the average Indian. Four hundred million Indians currently have no access to commercial energy sources. As India’s economy grows so too do the average citizen’s expectations of access to services that in the developed world are taken for granted. High-calorific coal exported from Australia will feed India’s demand for energy, which is expected to increase six-fold by 2030-31. Along with coal and renewables, nuclear energy has for decades been part of India’s mix, and the country already has 20 nuclear reactors, with seven more under construction. By 2030-31, nuclear reactors are expected to be providing eight per cent of India’s total generating capacity. India needs uranium, and Australia has plenty of it.


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Trade figures reflect the importance of energy-related commerce. Coal is Australia’s principal export to India. At A$7 billion in 2010-11, coal imports made up about half of all Indian imports from Australia. Gold, copper ore and petroleum crude were the next largest trade items, indicating India was gradually – albeit to a much smaller degree – becoming dependent on Australian commodities to feed its hungry and growing economy, in the manner of Japan, South Korea and China in earlier decades. Australia is India’s eighth largest trading partner (though only 29th largest export market) and India represents Australia’s fifth largest trading relationship. The expansion of trade has been appreciable. From A$6.54 billion in 2003-04, bilateral trade reached A$22.4 billion in 2009-10, declining marginally the following year largely due to a minor contraction in Australian merchandise exports to India (owing perhaps to the temporary blip in the global economy). A free trade agreement, in the works since India proposed it in 2007, has had fitful progress, and the feasibility study was finally concluded three years later. In May 2011, negotiations began in earnest to reach a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA). Optimistic projections suggest the proposed CECA could double bilateral trade to the level of A$ 40 billion in five years.

For India, Australia holds the key to addressing two compelling concerns: energy security and food security. Rate of growth of food production in India is not keeping up with a growing, increasingly prosperous population. Consumption of cereals and pulses (a source of protein for many Indians, including hundreds of millions of vegetarians) and a dramatic expansion in milk and dairy products consumption has led to food price inflation climbing significantly in recent years. Chickpeas comprise the leading Australian agricultural export to India after wool, amounting to US$ 88 million in 2008-09. As the Australia–India Joint Free Trade Agreement (FTA) Feasibility Study document of 2010 pointed out, with a characteristic cautious optimism:

“There are high levels of complementarity in agricultural trade between the two countries. These include the ability of Australia to meet domestic shortfalls in Indian production, agri-trade opportunities … and the opportunity to trade seasonal items on a counter-seasonal basis, in both directions (which would provide consumers with access to high quality fruit and vegetables at a lower price year round). Mutually advantageous opportunities in the agricultural trade relationship are only likely to grow. Due to changing structure of demand, India is likely to become a more regular importer of certain food items, some of which Australia will be well placed to provide, such as high-value dairy products. In addition, as India’s food processing sector continues to expand and look for export opportunities, Australian inputs (potentially facilitated under an FTA) could become an increasingly important part of India’s supply chain. There are limits, however, to the extent to which Australia’s agricultural goods exports to India could increase. Australia faces substantial capacity constraints due

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to the limited availability of arable land and water. Australia has existing agricultural export markets that it will need to continue to service. Australian agricultural exports are also not likely to compete with subsistence farmers in India, and are more likely to target distinct niche markets in urban high population centres.”

To be fair, the energy-security potential is more easily appreciated in India than the food-security potential. For historical reasons, widespread concerns and misgivings remain about opening up agri-product markets in ways that challenge the almost totemic quest for agricultural self-sufficiency, especially if it hurts Indian farmers. Nevertheless this sentiment is fast retreating given the food price spikes and increasing shortfalls in pulses, oil seeds and milk and dairy products. However, rather than seek to influence the argument externally, it would be judicious for countries such as Australia to wait for the domestic debate in India to acquire a momentum of its own in this regard. It is best for India to make up its mind for itself.

Trade is booming – but what of investment? Over 50 per cent of India’s US$ 1.8 trillion GDP is made up by services. Despite globally praised Australian expertise and brands in the services sector, Australia has not quite capitalised on this. Its services exports to India are a small A$2.5 billion (2010-11 figures). With a few exceptions – such as the Macquarie Group’s Mumbai-based arm partnering State Bank of India (SBI), India’s largest bank, to launch and manage a private-equity infrastructure fund that has a committed capital of close to US$ 1 billion – the iconic brands of Australia have been missing from Indian’s financial services ecosystem. It is the same sentiment in telecommunications, where India is now among the world’s largest markets. Overall Australian FDI in India in 2010-11 amounted to an astonishingly small A$755 million. To put that in perspective, India’s economy (GDP) is 7.5 times larger than Malaysia’s. However, Australian FDI in Malaysia in 2010-11 was four times more than that in India.

Ironically, Australian companies had a head-start in more than one of India’s sunrise sectors in the early 1990s but chose to waste early advantages. Telstra was among the first telecom companies to win mobile service licences in India in collaboration with a local business conglomerate. In fact Modi-Telstra, as the joint venture was known, was the first company in India to provide mobile telephony services. A few years later, Telstra chose to sell out and leave. This was perhaps a miscalculation, given that after initial policy roadblocks, the Indian mobile market boomed. There are today some 800 million mobile subscribers in India, taking the country’s tele-density (number of telephones for every 100 people) from 2.8 in 2000 to over 70. Telstra, which re-entered India in 2011 to


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offer long-distance (national/international) voice as well as Internet services, has missed most of this spectacular story. The experience with ANZ Grindlays Bank has been similar. Grindlays had been operating in India for some 150 years, since the mid-19th century, and was by the end of the 20th century the largest foreign bank in India with over 50 branches. In 2000, in an action that was interpreted in India as a bet against the country’s economic prospects, the Australia New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) sold its Grindlays subsidiary to Standard Chartered, which killed off the brand name and merged Grindlays’ branches with its own operations. ANZ took that decision at a time when it was expanding aggressively in China and clearly saw a better future in one Asian giant rather than the other. To be fair, it was also worried by a big legal settlement that had arisen in India, collateral damage from a stock market scandal in the early 1990s that had proved expensive for it. The upshot was it divested itself of a brand name which, although foreign in ownership and origin, was among India’s most cherished.

The departure of Telstra and ANZ in quick succession left many business analysts in India with the impression that Australian companies were only in it for the short haul. India is not as an easy place to do business. Policy confusion, regulatory ambiguity, frequent changes in government (at the federal or central level and in the states), the unhurried pace of liberalisation and reform: all of these are legitimate complaints of investors. Rio Tinto (which has a diamond and an iron ore project in India) and to an extent BHP Billiton have been waiting close to 20 years for the mining sector to be opened up. Glacial-paced decision making affects environmental and land acquisition clearances, and infuriatingly slow legal redress is fact of life. All of these remain genuine concerns for foreign investors. The Commonwealth Games episode was nasty evidence to many Australian companies that it was easy to be caught in the crossfire. India hosted the Games in 2010 amid charges of corruption and kickbacks in procurement by the quasi-public agency tasked with organising the event. As corruption scandals and court cases mounted against the organising committee following the Commonwealth Games, many Australian vendors and service-providers found themselves short-changed, with payments deferred as the Games Committee and the Indian government declined to clear cheques for fear of the courts.

While all of this is of valid concern, India also rewards patient investors and those who wait long enough for the right opportunity. As for the lament that domestic politics muddies straightforward business transactions and calculations, it can cut both ways. For instance, as India won its nuclear commerce exemptions from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group in 2008 – the first nuclear-weapons power that had not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty to do so – Australian uranium became a coveted commodity. In those early days, Australia could have promised uranium supplies expeditiously and asked for a quid pro quo in the form of, say, an opening up of the mining sector. Instead, embroiled in a debate at home, the uranium decision was delayed by Canberra

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till late 2011, and was seen in India as having happened because Washington pushed hard for it. By that time, India had sewn up uranium supplies from other countries and while Australian yellowcake will certainly be needed in the coming decades, the moment for a decisive bargain has been lost.

The perception of Australia as a nation interested only in a quick buck was only bolstered during the student violence controversy of 2009, and the willingness of authorities to allow the opening of more and more mediocre (so-called ‘shonky’) colleges so long as they brought in revenues from Indian students, even if they did long-term damage to the reputation of Australian higher education as an enterprise. Parents and students who have had their fingers burnt by the shonky colleges cannot be blamed if they begin to look at other areas of Australian competitiveness and business through a tainted prism. The building of a national brand in a foreign country is more than just the building of individual company brands, and Australia may have learnt this the hard way.

While Australian investment in India is smaller and less ambitious than either country would want it to be, Indian investment in Australia has been growing. This investment is largely confined to two sectors: resources and to a smaller extent information technology. Almost all of India’s large IT companies (Infosys, Wipro, TCS, HCL and so on) have subsidiaries in Australia. Tech Mahindra’s largest product development centre outside India is in Melbourne.

The big numbers, however, are in resources: Sterlite Industries’ and the Aditya Birla Group’s investments in copper; Tata Power’s 11.4 per cent stake in Geodynamics for Aus$ 44.1 million that will give it access to Queensland coal; Petronet LNG’s agreement to source 1.5 mmtpa of LNG from the Gorgon Project in Western Australia for 20 years starting in 2014. Among the largest individual investors in Australia from any country is the Adani Group. It has acquired a coal mining prospect from Linc Resources in the Galilee Basin in Queensland. Valued at Aus$ 1 billion (half paid up-front, half in royalties over 20 years), it was bettered by Adani’s own acquisition of 99-year rights to the Abbot Point Coal Loading Terminal (Queensland) for Aus$ 1.83 billion. Lanco Infratech bought Griffin Coal for about Aus$ 800 million. GVK Power and Infrastructure contracted to buy two coalmines from Hancock Prospecting for over Aus$ 2 billion. Almost all of these deals have happened in the past two years or so, indicating not just India’s energy hunger but also a long-term bet on stiff coal prices. In a sense, as one equity consultant in New Delhi points out, Queensland has emerged as a key location for India’s energy security needs.

Indian investors in Australia have almost unanimously reported a good experience. After the Abbot Point acquisition, a senior executive of the Adani Group told a leading Indian politician he was extremely impressed by the manner


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in which the Australian government and DFAT officials facilitated the deal and the clarity and transparency of doing business in Australia. He contrasted this with the interface with public authorities in India. Adani was given permission to bring his own India-trained skilled workforce to staff his mining and port development operations. This has led some diplomats to explore the idea of the long-term lease of marginally fertile Australian land – as opposed to the more politically contentious outright purchase of land – for use by Indian farmers, to grow food for consumption in India. Diplomats say preliminary discussions have begun on the subject, but much will depend on whether prospective Indian investors have a sense of long-term price stability in their domestic market.

It has not been lost on Indian businessmen that they have been spared many of the controversies that accompany Chinese (largely Chinese state-owned or state-backed) companies’ attempts at picking up resource assets in Australia. The reference is to, among others, Aluminium Corporation of China (CHINALCO) having problems expanding its stake in Rio Tinto in Australia in 2009. “We went in with some trepidation, but encountered no hostility at all,” a business executive from one of the Indian companies that has invested in coal assets in Australia told a member of the Taskforce, “The fact that we were private companies concluding commercial transactions and not part of a government strategy certainly helped.” Indeed, perceptions of Australia as a welcoming and easy place with which to do business seem strongest, anecdotal evidence suggests, among those Indian companies that have actually invested money there.

The popular view

In 2010, 138,648 Indian business and leisure tourists visited Australia, a rise of 11 per cent from the previous year. Given that the number of Indian tourists going to Australia only passed 20,000 in 1994 and was still below 60,000 a year at the turn of the millennium, that actually represented a massive growth in both travel to Australia and interest or curiosity in that country. This period coincided with a boom in student visas, with a six-fold increase in the number of Indian students enrolling at education institutions in Australia in the five years from 2004 to 2009, from 20,500 enrolments to 120,000 enrolments. In 2010, enrolments fell, a fall blamed on a fear of street violence affecting Indian students.

It is important to place those numbers and the related phenomenon in context. In the period after 9/11, a perception arose in middle class Indian families that America was perhaps not as safe a study destination as it had been and a search began for alternatives. Australia, with much the same hospitable, migrant-friendly profile of the United States, was an obvious candidate. The Australian dollar was worth 70 per cent of the US dollar at that point and this made an education in Australia that much cheaper.

By the end of the decade two things were beginning to happen. Firstly, it was becoming obvious that post-9/11 paranoia about the US retreating behind its

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twin moats was misconceived. There was no evidence that the internal security environment had deteriorated, no follow-up terror strike on the American homeland and no suggestion that South Asian students or visitors were being denied visas or were any less welcome. Secondly, the Australian dollar had climbed and climbed as a result of the commodities boom and was challenging the US dollar (it continues to hover around parity at the time of publication). Whether Indian student enrolments would have tailed off, or grown even more strongly, we will never know. However, in the popular imagination the decline in enrolments was inextricably linked to the violence.

Why did the students become such a hot button topic in India? Many of the students were children of middle class, semi-rural parents who were not just leaving India for the first time, but had never left their home states, predominantly Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh in north India, and Andhra Pradesh in south India. There were other poignant aspects to their stories; in several cases parents had borrowed money from private money-lenders at high rates of interest to fund their education. The expectation was that a good degree or diploma would lead to a work permit, facilitating migration and citizenship. This was a reflection of the belief that Australia was a land of opportunity and merit and that hard work, following an initial investment, would be rewarded there.

While this idealistic attitude was laudable and actually spoke for the positive attributes ordinary Indians associated with Australia, it was exploited by unscrupulous agents on both sides. Many of the students were clearly unprepared for Australia, or indeed for any alien culture. Neither the colleges, nor the Indian migration/student enrolment agents (the two are often packaged together in India, especially in smaller cities) primed the students about what to expect in Australia, the dos and don’ts, and who and where to avoid. There was no anticipatory counselling. The students were led to believe that working part-time in Australia was easier than it was and that rules about the number of hours of employment a student was permitted in a week were and could be breached. Not all students were innocent victims – some went in with their eyes open, as their motivation was exploiting loopholes in Australia’s residency and migration system, and not education.

The net result of all this was that certain students were unhappy and for different reasons. The serious-minded discovered they were being short-changed. The impressive institutions of the colourful brochures they had been given were actually small education shops on busy streets. Others, with different plans, found themselves driving taxis within a week of landing in Australia, and plugging into local Indian networks and businesses – working longer hours than legally mandated and for lower wages. The first violence against Indian students actually came from Lebanese taxi drivers, migrants from a similar background, who found the new Indian arrivals undercutting them. It was an economic battle between two migrant groups and certainly not a racist attack on Indians. However, once it began to be reported as racism, it acquired a life of its own and spurred copy-cat attacks that were racist in nature. In a sense, this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. At


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the root of the problem were two very different but equally disreputable business networks – shoddy college entrepreneurs in Australia and migration racketeers in India.

The Indian media chose to see it differently, and this is partly the nature of modern news media and television. Initial reports of crimes against some students were magnified as an official policy of racial discrimination. One thing led to another and news television in turn spurred community-level activism in Punjab and Haryana. This put pressure on constituency MPs, who began to lobby the MEA. The episode was perhaps the earliest example of how the interplay of news television and provincial politics was beginning to affect foreign policy and diplomatic action in India. It was as sobering a lesson for the MEA as it was for foreign countries and diplomats dealing with India. Unfortunately for Canberra – and for the government of Victoria, since much of the unrest was in Melbourne – it came at Australia’s expense. Perhaps an enhanced Indian media presence in Australia would have helped in this respect. It is certainly something for the public broadcaster, Doordarshan, to consider, given the growing Indian community down under, and the interest it seems to generate back home.

Ironically, in the long term, the student crisis may have done India-Australia relations a good turn. For Canberra, they have served to emphasise just how important the role and experience of the Indian diaspora can be for a host country in terms of forging ties with Indian government and society. Indian perceptions of other countries are often shaped by the conditions and achievements of the Indian community there. As per an Indian government report of 2002, there were least 20 million Indian citizens or people of Indian origin living abroad. That number has almost certainly grown and was possibly a conservative calculation in the first place. Indians can be found everywhere, from Surinam to Singapore, the Maghreb to the Midlands, Australia to Alaska. Recent migration (as opposed to that during the British Raj) is voluntary and economic in nature.

When looking at another country, Indians don’t assess its reputation as a ‘land of opportunity’ in abstraction but in the light of how the Indian community lives and works and the respect it enjoys. The United States is a case in point. The Indian American community has among the highest per capita incomes for any ethnic group and has disproportionate representation in the medical profession, on academic campuses and in the technology hubs of Silicon Valley. As the role of the Indian American community in incubating and encouraging a bond between New Delhi and Washington in the past decade shows, migrant Indian groups are not necessarily only carriers of grievance. They can become a force-multiplier for traditional diplomacy.

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Can Indo-Australian relations build a similar edifice? It would be unwise to make categorical predictions but tighter regulation of Australian education providers will certainly help. In making registration requirements for colleges more rigorous, authorities in Victoria and New South Wales have certainly reduced the numbers of Indian students who will go to Australia, at least in the short term. But quality outcomes are the main thing. Successful Indians become aspirational role models and shape perceptions of their host country back in India. There are some 400,000 Indian community members in Australia, including those of Indian origin from Fiji and Malaysia. Migration from India has been a longstanding phenomenon. Perth was traditionally the first port of call for those who left from southern India, and the south-eastern coastal city of Chennai (Madras). Anglo-Indians (those of mixed British and Indian ancestry) migrated to Australia in considerable numbers from Kolkata (Calcutta) and Bangalore in the years after independence in 1947. In the 1970s and 1980s, white-collar professionals, doctors and engineers, took the flight down under. In the 1990s came more and more technology professionals and academics.

As it happens, this community is quiet and largely unknown in India. It lacks the champions and news celebrities of the Indian community in the US or the United Kingdom. Part of the reason is sheer numbers. The immigrant population in the UK is largely from the Indian subcontinent (including Indians who came via east Africa) and the Caribbean. In the US, there are estimated to be about two million Indians or people of Indian origin. In contrast, the bulk of Asian migration to Australia has been from East Asia. Many Indians who first saw, heard or read substantial news media reportage about an Indian presence in Australia did so only after the students’ episode. They were left with the idea that Indians down under were taxi drivers, ran or worked at small restaurants, or were poor students who could only afford to live in dodgy and dangerous parts of town, hiding from local bullies as well as an unsympathetic police. It is exceedingly important to correct this public profile imbalance.

An Indian diplomat who has served in Australia feels the Indian community there is successful but still hasn’t reached critical mass in that “it is not confident of engaging in public life, on public issues”. Some successful Australians of Indian origin told the Taskforce of their perception of a ‘glass ceiling’ in some organisations, beyond which it has been difficult for people of South Asian origin to rise. All in all, white-collar Indians remain the “model minority”, staying under the radar and avoiding controversy. This perhaps explains why too few of them made themselves available to Indian media outlets to provide the alternative point of view in 2009. In time to come, perhaps this community will become more active in politics and public affairs, and this too will help bilateral understanding.

Indians tend to look upon Australia as a younger version of America – an open democratic and federal society, with vast open spaces, a meritocracy built by the sinews of generations of migrants. While such comparisons are inherently


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inexact, at a superficial level there is a persuasive cogency to them. However, in the narrow arena of political mobilisation, this may lead to some pitfalls in the future that need to be guarded against. A variety of stakeholders in India – from business to the political establishment – have got used to the idea of the Indian community in America as a formal, organised lobby, members of which will work the phones, appeal to if not harass their local Congressman, trade campaign donations for policy favours and use their influence and clout to promote Indian interests as they did during the passage of the India-US civil nuclear deal legislation in 2006-08.

Politics in Washington, DC, and on Capitol Hill is used to this form of engagement. Various ethnic lobbies – Polish Americans, Jewish Americans, Greek Americans – perform similar roles there and Indians are only adding to the list. Canberra has a very distinct political culture and may not appreciate a migrant community organising itself into a political lobby to influence specific policies towards individual countries. The reaction to Chinese-community mobilisation in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when large groups of Chinese students and Chinese-origin Australian citizens were flown down to Canberra to take part in anti-Tibet public demonstrations, is worth learning from in this regard. While there is not even a hint of a similar effort by Indians, whether as private citizens or government representatives, it is vital to nip in the bud this potential source of misunderstanding.

Likewise, Australians need to be aware that while the Indian establishment and middle classes take pride and boast of the achievements of NRIs (non-resident Indians, an umbrella term for Indians citizens as well as people of Indian origin living abroad) or PIOs (people of Indian origin), they find it difficult to accept prescriptive messages from these sections of the community, however well meant. Foreign governments, business corporations and agencies that have used NRIs with the appropriate credentials to seek to tell Indians what is good for them have often ended up on a slippery slope. As such the diaspora and its careful and sensitive handling vis-à-vis Indian society and government requires deep understanding on the part of any Australian, public official or otherwise, dealing with India. This is not so much a double-edged sword as a multiple-edged one.

Societies can like each other or be intelligible to each other. In the case of India, Australia is both likeable and intelligible, thanks to a shared language, similar constitutional provisions (India’s Constituent Assembly discussed and borrowed from features of the Australian Constitution while drawing up the Indian Constitution) and a largely similar legal system. It may seem anachronistic now but there was a time when Australia was a location of deeply-respected scholarship on India. A.L. Basham, the historian and Indologist who spent several years at the Australian National University in Canberra, made an outstanding contribution to India’s understanding of its past when he wrote The Wonder that was India. Ken McPherson was an authority on India, Indian

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Muslims and the Indian Ocean. People like Basham and McPherson collaborated with and inspired a generation of Indian scholars, including the Subaltern Studies group. Those wells of Australian Indology have now dried up. Even so, their legacy is part of a more robust bond than that shared by many close allies. Shared sensibilities have fostered a mutual respect at a public level that is, frankly, not reflected in the relationship between governments.

On December 14, 2011, Rahul Dravid, former Indian cricket captain, became the first player from outside Australia to deliver the Bradman Oration at the Australian National War Memorial in Canberra. His opening words were inspirational and memorable and could only have come from a man who, while being a proud Indian, knows Australia well and cherishes the shared moorings:

“The people of both our countries are often told that cricket is the one thing that brings Indians and Australians together. That cricket is our single common denominator.

India’s first Test series as a free country was played against Australia in November 1947, three months after our independence. Yet the histories of our countries are linked together far more deeply than we think and further back in time than 1947.

We share something else other than cricket. Before they played the first Test match against each other, Indians and Australians fought wars together, on the same side. In Gallipoli, where along with the thousands of Australians, over 1,300 Indians also lost their lives. In World War II, there were Indian and Australian soldiers in El Alamein, North Africa, in the Syria-Lebanon campaign, in Burma, in the battle for Singapore.

Before we were competitors, Indians and Australians were comrades. So it is only appropriate that we are here this evening at the Australian War Memorial, where along with celebrating cricket and cricketers, we remember the unknown soldiers of both nations.”

Perhaps the most evocative line in that speech was: “Before we were competitors, Indians and Australians were comrades.” The Indian-Australian camaraderie and the Indian affection for the Australian has survived and thrived despite the politics, despite the Cold War, despite the student violence episode, despite the cricket controversies. It now remains for New Delhi’s bureaucrats and the Indian government to catch up with the rest of the country.


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An Australian PerspectiveIn December 2011, Australia’s ruling Labor Party exempted India from its long-standing ban on selling uranium to nations that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The decision, which is yet to be translated into actual sales, has raised expectations of improved relations between Canberra and New Delhi after years of tensions over nuclear issues, and a spate of bad publicity generated by a series of violent attacks on Indian students in Australia in 2009-10. Three factors underpin optimism about future ties. Firstly, India’s growing demand for energy, and Australia’s capacity to provide it, have established a solid base for expanding economic relations. Secondly, the rise of China has created an incentive for Australia and India to work more closely together to ensure their regional interests are protected. And thirdly, reported incidents of violence against Indian students have declined, and reforms to Australia’s international student program have been adopted to improve and better regulate education services and streamline associated immigration outcomes.

For the Australia-India relationship, new opportunities beckon – not for the first time. In the 19th century, such influential figures as Alfred Deakin, who would later become Australia’s second Prime Minister, confidently predicted that “intimacy between the two countries will doubtless be established in the course of time.”2 History, while not proving Deakin wrong, has kept him waiting.

Today, sections of the Australian public are already engaging. They are reading Indian fiction, watching Bollywood movies, and becoming more familiar with Indian regional cuisines; they know and like Indians at their workplaces, and their children go to school together; families have forged links by intermarriage. Young Australians are renowned for donning their backpacks and travelling rough to remote corners of Asia, India included, bringing back lifelong memories, and sometimes more. Members of Australia’s fast-growing Indian community are building business links and these will bolster and expand people-to-people ties. But despite the enormous range of contacts and interests, Australians still struggle to see the world from India’s point of view, and fail to understand the many lessons Indians have drawn from their history. In decades past, Australian scholars were among the world’s foremost writers and researchers working on India, but in the absence of political leadership this crucial source of expertise has not been maintained. Meanwhile, Indian literature, history and geography are not adequately taught in Australian schools. Media coverage of India has for many years been dominated by images of poverty, anachronistic cultural practices, religious violence and cricket. This is beginning to change, but the new images of ‘cyber India’ are often just as superficial as the old. Recent events show how mistrust and misunderstandings, rooted in very different histories and cultures, can quickly overpower obvious commonalities like democracy, cricket and the English language. With the rise

2 Deakin, Alfred, ‘Irrigated India: An Australian View of India and Ceylon and the Irrigation and Agriculture’, quoted in Auriol Weigold’s Introduction to India and Australia: Bridging Different Worlds. Editors Brian Stoddart and Auriol Weigold, Readworthy Publications, New Delhi, 2011. p. 3

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of new communication technologies and reduced levels of government control over the dissemination of information, news reporting has gained greater immediacy and impact on public perceptions globally. The increased speed of communications means news narratives are more than ever cobbled together on the run, shaped by visual images, couched in terms of drama and conflict, and articulated in a pastiche of fact, commentary and popular myths. When Indian students became victims of street crime in Melbourne, the Indian media rushed to label Australia as a racist society. Similarly, when preparations for India’s 2010 Commonwealth Games hit hurdles Australian media coverage reinforced public perceptions of India as dysfunctional and corrupt with equal alacrity. Although expanding trade and normal diplomatic relations were not disrupted, decades of people-to-people ties and patient efforts to build goodwill seemed to evaporate.

Twenty years ago it was rare for Australian travellers in India to encounter suspicion or hostility; but since the student crisis, it is less rare. Australia’s ‘brand’ has taken a heavy knock. Encouragingly, recent research has shown a remarkably rapid recovery in the perception of Australia in India. But the problem is more complex than such surveys indicate. Australia’s High Commissioner to India, Peter Varghese, believes relations have improved since trade and non-proliferation differences “soured a generation of Australian and Indian diplomats towards each other”.3 But Australia has underestimated the extent and cost of its myopic attitude towards India, and under-invested in rectifying it.

Unless these failings and negative perceptions are recognised – and the political will to remedy them is summoned – the Australia-India relationship will remain brittle, vulnerable to single-issue shocks. The key to transforming perceptions lies not principally in branding campaigns or cultural festivals, but in ensuring that Australia’s domestic and foreign policies engage pragmatically with the Indian reality, convey effectively what Australia has to offer, and pass the ‘foreign guest’ test whereby Indians and other residents and visitors from non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds are excited by the opportunities afforded by living, visiting and doing business in and with Australia.

India in the Australian Imagination

Australia has come a long way since the formal abandonment of the White Australia policy in 1973. We are, as a nation, affluent, innovative, multicultural and socially progressive, yet old attitudes of fear towards outsiders, particularly those from non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds, are frequently apparent in our social

discourse. For much of the last century, Australian perceptions of India were formed within the context of the British Empire. India was the ‘jewel in the crown’, and Australia a loyal lieutenant in an empire on which the sun never set. During World War I, Australian and Indian troops fought and died at Gallipoli under British commanders, but for very different reasons. By then Australia was a nation, but its people retained a strong sense of Britain as the ‘mother country’,

3 Peter Varghese, Foreword to India and Australia: Bridging Different Worlds. Editors Brian Stoddart and Auriol Weigold. Readworthy Publications. New Delhi. 2011. p.vi


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and the British monarch served – and still serves – as head of state. After the Great War, as India’s Freedom Struggle gained momentum, Gandhians were seen by many Australians as little more than troublemakers. Early reports of the Mahatma’s passive resistance campaign in South Africa published in Australian newspapers (although usually written by Britons) stressed the threat posed by ‘Asiatics in revolt’, both to Empire and ‘white’ nations like South Africa and Australia.4 Even after India won its struggle for independence in 1947 – in fact, as late as the mid-1960s – the long-serving Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies was aghast at India’s refusal to retain the British monarch as sovereign, and its failure to align with the West during the Cold War.5 Australia and India opposed each other’s policies during the Suez Crisis of 1956, and in the 1960s India supported Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist communists in the Vietnam War, while Australia backed America and sent troops.

The shared history and experience of British colonial rule meant post-colonial India and Australia emerged with somewhat similar political, legal, administrative and social legacies. But these have not necessarily translated into understanding and trust. In the view of some Australian scholars of India, the Indian elite’s fluency in English has acted as a barrier to deeper Australian familiarity with the country, creating the illusion that understanding Indian languages and culture—unlike their Indonesian, Japanese and Chinese equivalents—is unnecessary.6 Both countries inherited British-style legal systems, but Indians have so passionately embraced litigation that caseloads outstrip the capacity to adjudicate in a timely manner, scaring off Australian businesses already challenged by the complexities of the Indian commercial environment. And whereas undemocratic states can make foreign policy without consulting the public, freedom of expression and democracy can tend to amplify conflicts between nations, even when friendship is official policy. Even the gentlemanly game of cricket becomes fractious when one side holds the other responsible for flouting convention, as occurred during the Bodyline Test series in the 1930s between Australia and England, and the 2008 Australia-India Test match in Sydney.

4 ‘Asiatics in revolt.’ West Gippsland Gazette (Warragul, Vic) 5 Nov. 1907, p.45 Meg Gurry, ‘Leadership and Bilateral Relations: Menzies and Nehru, Australia and India,1949-1964’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter, 1992-1993), p. 510 -13 “It is possible to trace the origins of today’s lacklustre connection back to the leadership of the 1950s, to Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ lack of interest in India, and his failure to develop a relationship of any substance with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ... there appeared to be no room in his imagination for Asia at all, dismissing as he did India in his memoirs as a place too difficult for any ‘Occidental’ to understand. Gurry also quotes an Australian High Commissioner to India during Menzies time reporting to Canberra that India believed “we have no real national personality of our own: we are copies of the UK domestically and of the U.S. in foreign affairs”. P. 519 6 Robin Jeffrey made this observation in correspondence with the task conveners in February 2012

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Indians and Australians inhabit worlds so different that apart from the small minority who live and work in both places, perceptions of each other—good and bad—are little more than mental effigies. Most Australians have difficulty conceiving how a country without unemployment assistance and national health insurance could actually function; while some Australians from Judeo-Christian backgrounds are intrigued and inspired by Indian history, art and philosophy, many more are mystified – and in some cases unimpressed – by Hindu culture with its caste system and absence of devil, hell and commandments. The persistence of caste and the sheer complexity of Indian society, the depth of its history and the hold of past over present; all puzzle the average Australian. Recalling their posting to New Delhi, a former Australian High Commissioner once told a Taskforce member, “India is the most unjust society I have ever experienced. Sadly, there is something inevitable about their progress.”

Inhabiting their island continent, Australians tend to overlook the very different perspectives of a nation that shares land borders with two nuclear weapon states—China and Pakistan—both of which it has fought wars against within living memory. The scars of Partition have no equivalent in the Australian imagination, unless it is the dispossession and continued marginalisation of the indigenous Aboriginal people, or the nation’s losses during the Great War. The irony is that while Indians are known for their ebullience in the face of such difficulties, Australians, for all their relative security and affluence – or perhaps because of them – are at times prone to seeing a distant world, viewed in the abstract, as a threatening place. The coast is littered with defence fortifications against attacks that never eventuated, and the tenor of recent debates over asylum seekers arriving by boat reprises earlier fears of the ‘Yellow peril’ from the north.7

It was fear – of inundation by Asian ‘hordes’, especially Asians who might work harder or for lower wages, and thereby take jobs from whites – that drove the adoption of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, or White Australia Policy, which was not formally abandoned until 1973. This restriction on immigration partly explains Australia’s relatively low current population of 22 million people spread across a continent two and a half times the size of India. Low population has, in turn, reinforced fears about the nation’s capacity to defend itself, which have in turn convinced many of the need for a powerful, preferably white, ally and protector such as Britain or the United States, the two nations that since the founding of the Australian colonies have catered to this need. The contrast with India’s staunch independence and refusal to join foreign military alliances, despite being located in an unstable region, is the very antithesis of Australia’s approach, just as Australia’s continued acceptance of Britain’s Queen as its head of state provokes puzzlement among Indians, who are generally proud and possessive of their republic. Some of these gaps in understanding undoubtedly accentuate Australia’s at time severe reactions to development in India, whether

7 ‘Australia Today – Fort Denison: [Pinchgut]: A Relic of Early Sydney’ (1939). National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra http://aso.gov.au/titles/newsreels/australia-today-fort-denison-p/clip1/


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a bloody clash between rival religious or linguistic communities, or a decision to develop nuclear weapons. They help explain India’s view of Australian hypocrisy, lecturing others on the joys of nuclear disarmament while living under the American nuclear umbrella.

A patchwork fabric of commonalities – the English language, parliamentary democracy, and sport – has created an impression of shared values that masks far more important differences in world views and values between Australia and India. We are not, as some analysts claim, natural allies. The result has been a generally cordial, but distant relationship, described by most observers as one of benign neglect.

Benign neglect turns to antagonism

The traditional reality of ‘benign neglect’ is reflected in data on Australian public attitudes collected over decades. In 2004, the Roy Morgan-Gallup poll found three quarters of people surveyed could name at least one country they perceived as a threat. In this and earlier surveys, Indonesia, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Japan, Lebanon, Somalia, and even the United States were named. But India has never made Roy Morgan’s threat list.8 Since 2006, the Sydney-based Lowy Institute for International Policy has also been asking Australians to rank key foreign nations according to whether they can be trusted “to act responsibly in the world”. In 2011, India ranked higher on trust than China, Russia, Indonesia, Egypt and Iran. Over the period 2006 to 2011, India was consistently more trusted, and less distrusted than China. However, a growing awareness of the important role of China as an export market—and perhaps recent problems with India—have boosted China’s image to the point where the two countries are viewed as roughly equal on the trust scale, though both trail far behind the United States and Japan.9

A steady diet of cricket matches and the odd cinema blockbuster like Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi or Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding have been enough to sustain the cosy view that Australians ‘know’ India and that the two nations get along fine. Enough, that is, until the second half of the last decade, when Australia’s reputation in India went into freefall after a chain of unrelated events which included assaults and robberies that affected some Indian students in Australia; the unjustified detention of Indian doctor Muhamed Haneef on terrorism-related charges; ill-tempered on-field incidents during the Sydney Test cricket match of 2008; and the Rudd Labor government’s refusal to sell uranium to India, and its poorly handled withdrawal from a proposed quadrilateral dialogue with India, the United States and Japan, apparently under pressure from China. Any one of these stories might have made for a week of bad publicity. But by 2010, their combined impact had generated a meta-narrative in Indian media

8 Roy Morgan Research. Finding No. 4410. 26 Aug 20099 ‘The Lowy Institute Poll 2011–Australia and the world: public opinion and foreign policy.’ Lowy Institute for International Policy. Sydney

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coverage that depicted Australia as a racist nation, and inflicted serious damage on Australia’s reputation with the Indian public.10

Simon Anholt’s Nation Brand Index provides a snapshot of what happened in this critical period in relations, showing how Indians viewed things Australia, and vice versa, ranking each relative to a list of 50 nations.11

INDIAN PERCEPTIONS OF AUSTRALIA 2008 2009 2010

Australian people 7th 25th 27th

Australian products 7th 11th 12th

Australian governance 4th 12th 14th

Australia as tourist destination 7th 14th 17th

Australian culture 9th 12th 12th

Australia as a place to invest and migrate to 5th 12th 11th

Between 2008 and 2009, Australia’s overall reputation ranking among Indians fell from 7th to 14th; on a question about ‘equality in society’ it ranked 34th out of 50, placing it in the company of Iran and Columbia, or as Anholt described it, ‘rogue state’ status.12 Ironically, although Indian perceptions of Australia fell sharply, they never approached the negative depths of Australian perceptions of India.

10 Simon Anholt, Opening Plenary keynote Address to the Australian International Education Conference, Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre. 13 Oct 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vvzpCkRfdE&feature=related 11 Simon Anholt, Nation Brand Index Indian attitudes to Australia 12 Simon Anholt, Opening Plenary keynote Address to the Australian International Education Conference, Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre. 13 Oct 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vvzpCkRfdE&feature=related


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AUSTRALIAN PERCEPTIONS OF INDIA

2008 2009

Indian people 38th 41st

Indian products 28th 25th

Indian governance 44th 44th

India as tourist destination 31st 30th

Indian culture 17th 16th

India as a place to invest and migrate to 46th 43th

Figure 1: India-Australia perceptions, Anholt Nation Brand Surveys 2008 and 2009

So low is India’s reputation among Australians generally that building a strategic partnership with New Delhi will require significant political leadership in Australia.

In 2009, Prime Ministers Rudd and Singh committed their governments to building a “strategic level partnership”. However, the relationship has a history of false starts. In November 2011, the absence of India’s leader from the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting hosted by Australia in Perth, suggested that all was still not well (or, perhaps, the Indian PM had better things to do). Analysts saw the snub as related to Australia’s ban on uranium sales to India and other non-NPT signatory nations. But seen another way, the Indian government has calibrated its response to the troubles of 2009. They have agreed to pursue a strategic partnership, but are going to drive a hard bargain over the details. Things could have been much worse.

The problems of uranium sales and assaults on Indian students exemplify what analyst Rory Medcalf calls “a mixture of flawed policy and flawed perception” that has kept India and Australia apart.13 According to Professor Gail Pearson at the University of Sydney Business School, the nub of the problem “appears to be cultural”. In Pearson’s analysis, both countries fail to appreciate each other’s contributions in science, business, research and education. “Australians have not taken on board Indian multinationals, satellites, space technology and nuclear industry. For their part, Indians seem unaware that Australia has sophisticated cities, world ranking universities, multinational biotech firms, and a superb regulatory system. This means that when real issues between our countries arise – such as the appalling treatment of some Indian students and the sale of uranium – we tend to fall back on stereotypes: Australians are racist; Indians are corrupt.”14

13 Rory Medcalf, ‘Australia and India: how to advance.’ Lowy Institute for International Policy. Sydney. May 2010. p. 1.14 Gail Pearson, ‘CHOGM: our complex relationship with India.’ The Conversation, 26 Oct. 2011, reprinted in South Asia Masala (website). 1 Nov. 2011

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The price of flawed policy and negative perceptions

By 2009, educating more than half a million foreign students at Australian tertiary education institutions and vocational and English language colleges had become an $18 billion a year industry, and the nation’s third largest earner of foreign currency.15 By comparison, the entire national Defence budget that year was about $22 billion. The fastest growing segment was Indian students, second in number only to those from China.16 That same year, Australia received more students from India than did the United States, a country 14 times more populous.

Educating international students was identified by government in the 1990s as a potentially lucrative income source, and Australia has competed vigorously with the U.S., Britain and Canada for a share of the market. When economic growth produced labour shortages in sectors of Australia’s economy, new visa categories were introduced offering a pathway to permanent residency to students in certain trades and professions as an added sweetener. In 1999, the Howard government expanded the list of skilled occupations that qualified applicants under its skilled migration program. In 2001, international students were included in the program, providing them with a fast track to permanent residency. Whereas previously they had been forced to return to their home countries to apply for a residency visa, they could now apply onshore.17 The policy was designed to satisfy two main objectives. Firstly, fees paid by international students would help plug the gap in education revenues caused by declining levels of government funding for the sector. Secondly, international students who graduated with the right qualifications could help fill labour shortages in overheated sectors of the Australian economy. It has become conventional wisdom that international students were gaining residency in Australia ‘by the back door’, but in reality, they were simply participating in a program set up and run by the Australian government. Shifty practices, where they occurred, were largely confined to a small number of so-called shonky colleges offering sub-standard education in order make a quick buck, and students taking course primarily for the path to residency they offered. But the resulting influx of fee-paying students created a gold rush mentality; in some institutions almost half of enrolments were international students, and even some elite Group of Eight universities sourced more than a quarter of their students from overseas.18 But most of the growth in student numbers after 2005

15 Michael Knight, Strategic Review of the Student Visa Program 2011. Australian government. Canberra. June 2011. p. vii. The highest estimates of foreign student numbers in 2009 of around 650,000 include people on tourist visas undertaking studies. 16 Larsen, J.J, Payne, J and Tomison, A, Crimes against international students in Australia: 2005–09. Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, Aug 2011. p. 217 Bob Birrell and Healy, E (2010) ‘The February 2010 Reforms and the International Student Industry. People and Place, 18 (1): 65-80)18 John Ross, ‘Elite unis over a quarter international’ The Australian (Higher Education) 14 Oct. 2011. Citing Australian Education International figures, Ross mentions the University of Ballarat (47 percent) as topping international exposure levels, with the Universities of Melbourne, NSW, Adelaide and the Australian National University all at 27 per cent. The Australian average overseas enrolment


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came from private sector Vocational Education and Training (VET) institutes and colleges. Indians were especially well represented in this sector; of 100,000 Indians enrolled in 2008, almost half undertook trades courses at private vocational colleges.19 The dividend for Australia was not purely economic; educating students from abroad is seen as playing “a critical role in fostering stronger international links and developing diverse skills in Australia and overseas.”20 The influx of Indian students made South Asian faces – long absent in large numbers from Australian streets – a familiar presence in the nation’s cities, and almost overnight created deeper people-to-people ties with the emerging Asian giant.21 The potential benefits for Australia’s reputation, its long term security and prosperity were incalculable.

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Note: There is break in series between 2001 and 2002

700,000

600,000

500,000

400,000

300,000

200,000

100,000

Higher Education

ELICOS

Vocational Education

School Education

Other

International Student Enrolments in Australia 1994-2011

Figure 2: International Student Enrolments in Australia 1994-2011 22

was six times higher than that of the United States.19 Christopher Ziguras, ‘Indian students in Australia: how did it come to this.”, Global Higher Education.http://globalhighered.wordpress.com. 11 Aug 2009. 20 Larsen, J.J, Payne, J and Tomison, A, Crimes against international students in Australia: 2005–09. Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, Aug 2011. p. 221 The arrival of large numbers of Indian students in Australia was, as Robin Jeffrey has written, “the biggest thing to happen to relations between the Australian land mass and the Indian subcontinent since the 1790s”. Robin Jeffrey. ‘Australia-India: Re-imagining the relationship.’ Inside Story. Swinburne Institute for Social Research.15 Feb 2010. http://inside.org.au/australia-india/ 22 Australian Education International website https://aei.gov.au/research/International-Student-Data/Pages/InternationalStudentData2011.aspx

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Yet, in 2009, Australia made headlines around the world for the series of assaults and robberies that affected Indian students, damaging its reputation as a safe and tolerant society, and its ‘brand’ as a provider of high quality education services to international students, particularly those from India. Worst affected was the Victorian capital, Melbourne, which regularly ranks as one of the world’s most liveable cities, with a cosmopolitan population and vibrant cultural, intellectual and sporting life. The Indian student crisis of 2009-10 plunged Australia’s education system into turmoil and prompted a major restructuring of its international education program. Indian student enrolments in higher education, VET and English language courses plummeted 60 per cent in the two years to Decem ber 2011. The argument that these falls were primarily the result of a stronger Australian dollar is not supported by the data. Comparable figures show Chinese enrolment numbers are down by only around ten per cent. Australia’s education system has paid a high price for bad policy and negative perceptions and is struggling to cope with the aftermath.

The Taskforce believes that the root cause of the problem was the shift, apparent over two decades, towards seeing international education primarily as a cash cow for universities, colleges and government, rather than as a critical component of Australia’s engagement with Asia that brought secondary financial benefits. As Jakubowicz and Monani observe, “The international political drivers of the Colombo Plan era were bmerged by the economic drivers of the neo-liberal market place.”23 Michael Knight’s review of the tertiary education sector accurately reflects the continuing dominance of the ‘export industry’ mindset, stating that “the biggest attraction is the financial benefits most university students bring; their fees and the broader economic stimulus that comes from the money they spend on food, accommodation, leisure, travel etc”.24 Why did the Australian government and bureaucracy fail to exercise due diligence in overseeing the program? Apart from isolated media reports, there seems to have been little or no capacity within government and education stakeholders to monitor and warn of the emerging crisis. Only when the problem began making headlines – and impacting on the bilateral relationship – was it finally taken seriously in Australia. Inevitably, the delay meant that concerned Australian officials and agencies were caught flat-footed, and forced to play catch up. Not all proved capable of adequately communicating Australia’s perspectives and response, especially to the Indian public, with the result that the citizens of India – the second largest overseas market for Australian education services – accepted Indian news reports that portrayed events as anti-Indian, rather than as a general crime problem that affected Indians because of where they lived and the types of

23 Andrew Jakubowicz with Devaki Monani, ‘International Student Futures in Australia: Human Rights Perspective on Moving Forward to Real Action,’ Occasional paper 6/2010 The Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Canberra 2010 p. 724 Michael Knight, Strategic Review of the Student Visa Program 2011. Australian government. Canberra. June 2011. p. ix


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work they did, as the government claimed.25 The respected Australian Institute of Criminology reported that assaults on Indian students were actually lower than the national assault average. However, the problem was illustrated by the fact that assaults on Indian students were higher than those on students from other countries. And on the key issue of claims that some attackers had racist motivations, the AIC report is mute.

Defensive statements by Australian officials about claims of racism provoked accusations of cover-up, particularly in Indian media. The perception of a cover-up was deeply damaging, reviving old perceptions of Australia as a racist nation and accentuating the fears of millions of Indians who had relatives or friends studying in Australia. Indians were not interested so much in the gap between reality and perception as Australian officials seemed to be, but in getting credible, detailed information about the crimes and the people affected, the motivations behind those crimes, and what government agencies were doing to stop more crimes being committed. When they didn’t get that information, panic set in.

The worst mistake officials can make in the modern media age is to appear defensive and insensitive. Granted, it is not easy and probably impossible to fully control or coordinate a national response to local and foreign media interest in a big, breaking news story; statements will be misquoted and taken out of context. But there needs to be greater awareness in Australia of the particular sensitivities when issues of race and nationality are involved, and a large and important overseas audience is deeply invested in – and closely following – a story. How would we feel if reports from overseas suggested young

Australians were being targeted and attacked, especially if our children or siblings were among them? Empathy, accuracy and taking responsibility must be the watchwords that govern official responses. The amount of information provided should satisfy the demand. These basic tenets of public diplomacy in crisis situations are not only politically effective but also the morally sound way to respond.

Tens of thousands of Indian students came to Australia believing it was a modern, affluent and safe society that welcomed foreign students into its world class education system. Many still believe it is, but thousands of others have left, disillusioned. Enrolments and commencements are down and the regulatory framework in flux, largely as a result of the 2009 crisis.26 From a peak enrolment load of 120,000 in 2009, there were as of March 2012 37,453 Indian student visa

25 Ben Doherty, ‘Pilloried in India over student assaults’ Sydney Morning Herald 17 June 2011. As Indian anger mounted over robberies and assaults on Indian students the Victorian Police Chief Commissioner, Simon Overland advised international students “Don’t display your iPods, don’t display your valuable watch, don’t display your valuable jewelry. Try to look as poor as you can.’’ In India, his comments were taken as insulting and suggestive that the victims were to blame. 26 Michael Knight, Strategic Review of the Student Visa Program 2011. Australian government. Canberra. June 2011. p. 32. Knight observes that although overall enrolment figures are rising for Australian universities, they are “in serious trouble” because of declining new enrolments (or ‘commencements’ to use the technical term).

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holders in Australia, representing a massive exodus and no confidence vote. Using the same financial benchmarks that defined the program’s success, the crisis has cost Australia billions of dollars and thousands of jobs in associated industries.

Data Year

Sum of DATA YTD Enrolements Sum of DATA YTD Commencements

Sector 2008 2009 2010 2011 2008 2009 2010 2011

Higher EducationVETSchoolsELICOSOther (Non-Award Course, Enabling Courses

28,40451,19911016,162765

28,02078,40517812,964921

2193775,0351492,016365

15,50755,5581181,447171

12,53632,3156114,662592

11,26944,82712410,612585

5,67934,330601,605208

4,92728,393521,335103

Grand Total 96,640 120,488 99,502 72,801 60,166 67,417 41,882 34,810

Figure 3: Indian student enrolment in Australia education institutions 2008-2011 27

After a period of contrition, Australia seems to have regained an interest in the bottom line. Some observers fear, however, that the revival of pragmatism in this regard is planting seeds for the creation of a new class of student-migrant who will end up in limbo. An international student who can afford it, could spend almost his or her entire twenties studying in Australia, get married and have children during that time, and still not qualify for permanent residency unless an employer agreed to sponsor him or her for a 457 visa for highly skilled workers. As Peter Mares writes, “Offering temporary work visas to international student graduates threatens to compound this problem ... It could see a blow-out in waiting lists for permanent residency ... creating a cohort of migrants who are permanently temporary – living and working in Australia, contributing to our economy and our society, but kept at arm’s length and unable to settle.”28 If Indian students return to Australia in large number, some lives thus complicated will be Indian. Migrants from India are already the second largest cohort behind those from the United Kingdom in the 457 skilled temporary visa category, with 9,800 applicants approved in 2011-12.

27 Australian Education International website https://aei.gov.au/research/International-Student-Data/Pages/InternationalStudentData2011.aspx28 Peter Mares. ‘The law of unintended consequences.’ Canberra Times. Sept 30 2011


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Indian students – a special case?

Not only were Indians victims of a higher than average rate of assault and robbery on international students in Australia in 2009-10 – they also suffered from the solution to the problem! The crisis provoked a wave of inquiries and legislation, which plunged tens of thousands of Indian students into further uncertainty. Some provisions were made to help those affected—visas were extended for up to 18 months while students considered their futures. But this period of grace expires at the end of 2012 and anecdotal reports suggested many fear going home without qualifications that their families, in some cases, sometimes sold land to acquire. What will happen come December to the thousands of Indian students and their families whose lives and finances have been impacted? And what will happen to an education sector that has become financially dependent on revenues from international students if Indians and other Asian students are offered more attractive opportunities elsewhere?

Looked at objectively, successive Australian governments have progressively liberalised the immigration system, in part, to cope with the fast-changing needs of an open economy operating in a globalised world. If this remains so, the logical outcome will be an increasing number of Indian professionals and skilled workers migrating to Australia to fill temporary positions which soon become permanent. Only the endlessly adaptive tangle of immigration regulations remains. Migration expert Bob Birrell takes the view that recent regulatory changes have produced a system that remains ‘opaque’.29

The student crisis of 2009 was not just about assaults on Indian students; widespread discontent with the poor standard of education offered by some institutions, in particular private VET and English language colleges, created tinder for student outrage. English language colleges – the entry point for many international students keen to enrol in degree courses after language training – saw a mass exodus of Indian students whose numbers fell from 16,162 to 1,447 in the three years to 2011. Chinese enrolments in the same sector were not similarly affected (33,000 in 2008, 27,500 in 2011).

Knight has suggested that, in future, technical education providers should deliver their services offshore. There is undoubted merit in this suggestion, yet there remains a large Indian market for VET training in Australia. In 2011, some 55,000 Indian students – or 75 per cent of all Indian students in Australia – were enrolled in such courses, accounting for a third of all international VET enrolments. Without onshore VET training, Indian students would no longer constitute the major slice of Australia’s foreign student mix that they did until recently. There are many reasons why we should care, but one is that, socially, the typical Indian vocational student represents one of the most dynamic layers

29 Bernard Lane, ‘Merit, not quantity, is the go.’ The Australian. 5 Oct. 2011

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of Indian society; the rising middle class. They are not the elites, but their story exemplifies where modern, socially mobile India is at today – a good narrative Australia can connect to. They are enthusiastic, hard-working and adaptable, qualities we once looked for in prospective migrants, and still should.

In any large scale social program there will always be individuals who seek to rort the system. However, in international education worldwide, there is no neat separation between educational and migration outcomes. Knight’s report makes a false distinction between ‘legitimate’ students who are just here to study, and those who are just here to migrate. In reality, the overwhelming majority of all international students are seeking migration options. Some, a few, will be happy to travel, study, work, make friends, graduate and go home; but in today’s globalised world, many more will wish to take advantage of the many opportunities for personal, professional and financial growth that come with connecting to Australia, and there is no sin in that. Knight’s recommendation to offer an automatic two- to four-year work and residency permit to university students, but nothing to others, suggests it is not possible for those non-university tertiary institutions to be properly administered and monitored. This is not the case. And Knight’s alternative of delivering VET courses offshore is a much longer term project from regulatory and other points of view.

In March 2012, the Federal government announced a relaxation of visa assessments for English language courses taken by international students. The decision offers some hope for a restoration of Indian student numbers in that sector.30 However, the risk of a resurgence of negative perceptions has been increased by changes to immigration criteria introduced retrospectively, which have created a less favourable migration outlook for thousands of Indian students who came to Australia under a more liberal regime, and now find that the goalposts have shifted. One highly regarded diplomat told the Taskforce, “These young Indians left their home villages with their heads held high, and now face the prospect of returning with their tails between their legs. For some, the dishonour will be too much.” The diplomat said he’d seen reports of attempted suicides and overstaying of visas by young Indians ‘stranded’ by the visa changes. Young Indians who overstay their visas and disappear into the community are easy prey for criminal mafias and others who can exploit their vulnerable legal status.

30 Bernard Lane, ‘Bowen opts for relaxed view on student visas.’ The Australian.15 Feb 2012.


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The Re-birth of Australia’s Indian community?

For all the negatives it generated, Australia’s troubled international student program provided a massive impetus for the development of a larger Indian presence in Australia. In the five years to 2011, the number of Indian-born residents doubled from 147,106 to 295,362, or from 0.7 per cent to 1.4 percent of the population. That means Indians now numerically constitute Australia’s fastest growing group of new arrivals from Asia. Hinduism is Australia’s fastest growing major religion, with the number of adherents leaping 189 per cent in the past decade (followed by Islam at 69 per cent, and Buddhism at 48 per cent). Migration, not conversion, is the big driver of expansion, with 84 per cent of Hindus born overseas. The number of people speaking Indian languages is also growing rapidly, with migration again the main impetus. More than 100,000 people speak Hindi at home and Punjabi is also growing fast, outpacing Hindi as the most common other Asian migrant homes. Punjabi is also growing fast, outpacing Hindi as the most commonly spoken tongue among Indian new arrivals. Indians now comprise the fourth largest group of new arrivals in Australia behind those from the United Kingdon, New Zealand, and China. But with a median age of just 31, Indian new arrivals are the youngest of all the main migrant groups. They are also the most male—125 men and boys for every 100 women and girls—reflecting cultural and demographic trends in India, but also the tendency of first-generation migrant families to send their men first. Given the key role played by the student program, the question arises as to what happens if Indian student numbers do not recover quickly? Could the growth of Australia’s increasingly dynamic and important Indian community stall? And if growth does resume, should something be done to ensure a better gender balance in Australia’s intake of Indian students?

Data from the 2011 Australian Census, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra 2012

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Media, Education, and Public Diplomacy

“Television now reaches almost every household in India, and the fact that the (student) incidents continued over a period of several months in mid-2009 (then) started again in 2010, negatively influenced Indian perceptions about how students were welcomed in Australia.

- Sujatha Singh, former Indian High Commissioner to Australia.

The Indian student crisis of 2009-10 exposed Australia to the harsh realities of cultural collision and media image-formation in the era of global migration, business and communications. In particular, it illustrated how instant, global, television news can sweep away decades of benign perceptions – in this case, Cricket, Commonwealth and Curry – and replace them with a more dramatic, negative counter-narrative. It’s a cautionary tale for governments, public servants, media practitioners and anyone whose life or business crosses borders about the devastating impact new media can have on old complacencies.

In February 2010, Australia’s Defence minister Stephen Smith acknowledged that the student crisis “cast a long shadow...across our broader relationship and bilateral agenda” with India.31 That same year, the respected Anholt-GfK Roper Brands Index survey provided empirical evidence of just how bad the damage has been. It found that Indians ranked Australia 49th among a list of 50 nations as a welcoming country. In conversation after conversation with Indian interlocutors, the Taskforce has encountered the same theme. Leading Indian television personality Karan Thapar said, “Our image of Australia is conditioned by cricket, a passion we share. Now we’ve inherited the idea that Indians are treated badly when they visit Australia.”32 Depictions of Australia as a racist country struck a chord with the average Indian media consumer. Yet India’s High Commissioner to Australia at the time of the crisis, Sujatha Singh, believes the experience officials from both countries gained by working together on the problem brought unexpected benefits. She told ABC Television, “There was intense media focus, perhaps a little too intense in some respects ... but it made us look at the entire issue in a holistic manner, almost in a whole-of-government manner. So all this came together, and I think at the end of it, we have a system that functions much better really ... It will be a slow process perhaps, but at the end of it I think that the actual people-to-people interaction will emerge stronger.”33

31 Hon Stephen Smith, Ministerial statement Australia-India relationship. 9 Feb 2010 p. 2 32 Interview with Karan Thapar, Sydney, Sept. 201133 Mrs Sujatha Singh, Indian High Commissioner to Australia in 2009-10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvhuBeg-yZg


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The good news is that not only has the spate of assaults and robberies affecting Indian students abated, with some of the perpetrators brought to justice – but Indian perceptions of Australia appear to be on the mend, and quite rapidly so. The Anholt survey showed Australia’s overall ranking by Indians rising in 2011 from 14th to 10th place out of 50 nations, with a similar improvement in the ranking of its governance. Perhaps most startling was the bounce back in the attitudes of Indians surveyed towards Australian people, up from 27th place to 20th, and Australia’s image as a tourism destination, whichrose from 17th place to 12th. These trends are mirrored in other surveys conducted by The Reputation Institute and AMR Research over the past three years:

INDIAN PERCEPTIONS OF AUSTRALIA 2010-2012

2010 2011 2012

Overall ranking 35th 24th 8th

Effective government 30th 16th 8th

Lifestyle 23rd 20th 6th

Business environment 30th 21st 6th

Recommend as a place to live 34th 23rd 5th

Recommend as a place to visit 31st 26th 12th

Recommend as a place to study N/A 22nd 9th

Figure 4: Reputation Institute and AMR Research, Sydney 2012. In 2010 respondents were asked to rank Australia against 34 other nations, in 2011 against 35 others, and in 2012 against 38 other nations.

The Taskforce welcomes this apparent turnaround after a troubled period in Australia-India perceptions. However, a repetition of the events of 2009, or new problems that impact negatively on large numbers of people of Indian origin in Australia, could make any such recovery short-lived. It is therefore important that Australia take an all-of-government approach to providing early warning of problems, including the impact of domestic Australian events on relations with India. There is, however, within the Australian system, no institution or department charged with a specific brief of this kind, a costly lacuna where ‘sensitive relationships’ – and these certainly include India – are concerned. The Taskforce advocates a more balanced Australian approach to the benefits that accrue from hosting international students, social and well as economic. But the economic damage caused by the 2009 debacle was considerable. If we adopt a conservative estimate that each international student in Australia brings in $30,000 annually to our economy, and that four such students create one extra job in Australia, the estimated losses over the past three years would approach $10 billion and 75,000 jobs. A timely study of Indian taxi drivers’ frustrations

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over assaults in Melbourne in 2008, or student concerns about education quality in some private vocational colleges, might have nipped the problem in the bud, and avoided damage to Australia’s reputation abroad. The new Australia India Institute, established in the wake of the student crisis (and sponsors of this report) can hopefully play a key role in providing early warning of any future problems, including home-grown social and policy challenges, thereby facilitating timely responses by government.

Contrary to the image presented in the recent ABC Television series Dumb, Drunk and Racist, Australia is fortunate to have a stock of goodwill to fall back on in its foreign relations. As Simon Anholt has observed:

“People think that Australians are intelligent, active, effective, humorous, informal, witty, good fun, great to be with, and they get things done. No nonsense, yeah? This is a wonderful image for a country to have, and it’s a perfect image for a country to have in the first half of the twenty first century because those are the values that people really seem to rate.”34

Such romanticised notions thrived in a world in which people of different nations rarely interacted. However, in the era of increasing transnational movement of people and globalised mass media and telecommunications, these images are subjected to the litmus test of daily reality. How will Australia be perceived in the long term if our leaders continue to play politics with issues such as immigration and asylum seekers? And what can Australia do to educate and uplift our own people, so that the producers of shows like Dumb, Drunk and Racist don’t manage so easily to find glaring examples of aggressive, boorish, intolerant, and yes, racist Australians for their ‘reality television’ productions?

Fostering Asia literacy in Australia, especially among Australian secondary school and university students, is critically important so that these voters of the future – and important relationships like the one with India – are immunised against negative media and political currents. Any decline in the informed consensus in Australia about the desirability of closer integration with Asia will limit the effectiveness of our public diplomacy and soft power projection abroad. Australia not only needs to do more than project a better image of itself to Asia; it needs to inculcate a deeper understanding of Asia among its own people.

Australia spends tens of millions of dollars annually promoting ‘Brand Australia’ abroad, and it should be an easy sell. As Anholt points out, the role of government should be to leverage its people’s popularity so that the benefits to the nation are maximised. Yet the pursuit of that objective is hampered by an Australian public diplomacy effort that is old fashioned, chronically under-funded, at times needlessly defensive and bureaucratised, and disengaged. Nowhere are these failings more apparent than in the nation’s international broadcasting services – Australia Network and Radio Australia, both government-funded and operated by the ABC.

34 Simon Anholt, Interview with Austrade. Uploaded 4 June 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vMmbv8cul0&feature=related


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With a budget of around $20 million annually, Australia Network television delivers news, sports, entertainment and cultural programming via satellite and cable networks across Asia, with tailored content for specific regions, including India. They do a good job with limited resources but, increasingly, it’s the wrong job to do. In the early 1990s, when Indian television news was state-controlled, there was a rationale for providing a service India lacked. But today, India’s level of media development is arguably more advanced than Australia’s. A single Indian news network probably has more Outside Broadcast vans than all Australian stations put together. There are today more than 500 registered television stations in India.35 One hundred and fifty of these are pay subscription services delivered to 148 million TV-owning households via free-to-air, cable and digital direct-to-home platforms.36 Digital media penetration soared by 63 per cent in 2012 to 42 million households. But this massive audience has little interest in English language foreign programming; research conducted in the three largest cities – a relatively modern, cosmopolitan segment of the population – puts this audience at only three and four per cent of the overall television market. 37

In the era of government-controlled news, Indians turned to foreign broadcasters for information they could trust. But since the revolution in Indian media smashed government censorship of news, trust in local sources has grown. In India, English language news is watched by about one per cent of viewers, and the vast majority of that is provided by India-based English language news channels. This means that international broadcasters like the BBC, CNN, and Australia Network are competing for a microscopic share – estimated by one informed source as 0.1 per cent of the Indian audience.38 Yet the bulk of Australia’s international broadcasting effort is focused on the dissemination of news in English. Australian taxpayers have a right to ask whether this represents good value for money, and whether a more focused strategy would achieve greater impact.

Radio Australia has tailored strategies that have continued to perform well in the Pacific and South East Asia. But Radio Australia’s India penetration in South Asia is now less than it was 20 years ago, the result of scaling back of short-wave broadcasting and failure to invest in new delivery technologies. At the very moment when India’s own news media was expanding exponentially, Radio Australia’s focus remained staunchly news-focused. Part of the problem is an ABC charter that requires Radio Australia to provide news to Australians abroad. The absurdity of this requirement is obvious in an era when anyone can read Australian newspapers and listen to ABC Radio News online every day wherever they are in the world. It also diverts scarce resources from the primary role of engaging with the Asian audience.

35 ‘23.77 mn DTH subscribers by June 2012: Trai’ (PTI) Business Standard. 5 Oct 201036 ‘Annual Universe Update 2012.’ TAM Media Research.37 ‘TV viewership behaviour across Delhi, Kolkata & Mumbai’ TAM Media Research. 2004

38 Taskforce interview with Bruce Dover, Chief Executive, Australia Network, 11 April 2012

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With a few beleaguered nations like North Korea aside, Asian audiences – particularly those living in a democracy like India – no longer need Australian-produced news, nor live coverage of sports not played outside Australia. There are few captive audiences left; Indian cable television viewers today can get access to more than one hundred channels for as little as four dollars a month; but the cable networks operators who decide what they see charge hefty carriage fees to foreign broadcasters seeking access. The only foreign networks that have succeeded in attracting significant Indian audiences in return for those carriage fees are the ones that have tailored their programming to Indian interests. Maintaining national platforms that project the ‘identity’ and ‘values’ of a nation is not only horrendously expensive nowadays; it is also deeply anachronistic, because it underestimates the growing sophistication of Asian audiences and the choices available to them.

The model of international broadcasting that still dominates Australia’s approach has its roots in the Cold War, illustrated by the fact that Australia Network’s budget comes directly from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This undermines the network’s credibility, and its freedom to produce programs of interest to Asian audiences, answerable as the network is to performance indicators set by diplomats and bureaucrats. There should always be mechanisms for high-level consultation between Australia’s Foreign Affairs department and the nation’s external radio, television and online services, especially when it comes to target countries. However, Radio Australia, like the domestic ABC, enjoys freedom from government editorial control, so why shouldn’t Australia Network?

Around the world, developed nations are changing the way they engage with international audiences, and Australia needs to catch up. There is still an important role for government to play, but the nation-branded radio and television station delivered by satellite is in decline, illustrated by deep funding cuts in countries like Canada and the Netherlands, and new approaches taken by others. The trend is towards content production tailored to individual national audiences, dubbed into local languages and sold or even given free to local broadcasters via a plethora of platforms – FM radio in Cambodia, social media in China. Voice of America, a behemoth of the cold war of the airwaves, has successfully pursued this route in Indonesia, attracting an estimated 20 million listeners to one of its music programs. MasterChef Australia has been a huge hit in India, as has Junior MasterChef in Vietnam, sold to and aired by local networks.

In a time of enormous and rapid change in communications technologies, Australia’s existing international broadcasters should lead the transition to a new and different culture of conversing with India. The new culture of interactivity made possible by the internet should guide their efforts. There are good reasons for this. Firstly, Asia’s next generation, and our own, expect to have their say. Material produced with the mobile phone-saturated Indian market in mind should always be delivered in forms suitable for mobiles, smartphones and tablets. By joining these conversations, Australia has much to learn. For decades, the success or failure of Australian broadcasting and public diplomacy efforts in the region have been difficult to


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measure. New technologies of interactivity and ‘people metering’ mean there is no longer anywhere to hide from accountability for investments. But the new environment also encourages creative risk; no-one really knows what will work, and more often than not the biggest successes are the least expected. It could be the latest Aussie soap opera, or a reality TV series that follows the lives of Indian students in Australia that works.

Australia Network and Radio Australia need to stop seeing themselves primarily as television and radio broadcasters. With few exceptions, nation-branded, satellite-delivered radio and television stations that talk at people, rather than engaging them, are no longer the smart way to approach India. Savvy Asian audiences will switch off crudely produced propaganda exercises in Australian self promotion. Placing the ‘Australian-ness’ of our cultural exports to India at the forefront of public diplomacy efforts is a recipe for failure. Indians don’t need to be convinced that we are Australian, or tutored in what Australia is –that information they can get from the internet. Subtler forms of communication are most powerful in forming positive images of people and places this century. Half of Australia Network’s budget is currently spent on satellite fees. Instead of wasting that money, a better result can be achieved if broadcasters become production houses, producing quality programming, preferably in vernacular languages, on subjects Asia cares about, and selling it at competitive rates, or gifting it to local broadcasters. If such programs are ‘advertising friendly’ – that is, produced to accommodate the ad breaks that fund local broadcasters – the uptake will be higher. As the ABC would not actually be producing the ads, its charter obligations would not be compromised. Any savings generated by a repositioning – including the possibility of merging the Australia Network and Radio Australia, or new ties-up with SBS – must be ploughed back into program production. Even better would be a substantially increased government financial investment in building on Australia’s reputation in Asia, and rebuilding it in India. This is crucial at a time when opportunities for engagement in social media, and delivery of content to mobile devices, offer engagement with the audience of the future.

These concepts are already being discussed within and between stakeholder organisations. The future of Australian public diplomacy will include a mix of some of them. The times demand bold decisions. But along with delivery mechanisms, Australia needs to re-think the relationship between image and reality when it comes to perceptions abroad. As Simon Anholt points out, “if a country is serious about enhancing its international image, it should concentrate on product development and marketing rather than chase after the chimera of branding. There are no short cuts. Only a consistent, coordinated, and unbroken stream of useful, noticeable, world-class, and above all relevant ideas, products, and policies can, gradually, enhance the reputation of the country that produces them.”39

39 Anholt, ‘Definitions of place branding – Working towards a resolution.’ Place Branding and Public Diplomacy. Macmillan. London. Vol. 6. 2010 p. 10

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In the 21st century media environment of tweets, blogs and 24-hour television news, the nations that fare best will be those that take seriously their obligations to protect all citizens and guests, regardless of race, religion and nationality. They will be nations that invest in educating their people in the history and culture of their own country, and other nations. And they will be those with a well-developed public diplomacy capable of engaging imaginatively with other nations, and responding rapidly and effectively when things go wrong. The worst sin a public official or politician can commit is to try to defend the indefensible; going into the foetal position of denial and obfuscation is a bad look.

The vision of Australian-ness routinely conveyed in official diplomacy – that of the multicultural nation that loves its sport and has great beaches – sits uneasily with the touchiness routinely displayed by officials when it comes to issues of race. Australia cannot escape its history, and should never try to. The White Australia Policy, though abandoned in 1973, provides a ready historical reference point for critics when members of minority racial or ethnic groups appear to be inordinately subjected to social deprivation or violence.40 All the more reason why politicians and officials should, in a bi-partisan manner, acknowledge the reality that racism exists in all societies, including Australia, and until proven otherwise, may be a factor. Yet, when the time came for an independent inquiry to be set up into the violence that affected Indian students in 2009-2010, the Australian Institute of Criminology somehow managed not to thoroughly investigate the issue of racial motivation. It was not that the AIC a probe would be pointless – it said such a study would be “invaluable”, but would take more time. Its report concluded, “Determining the motivation for offending would best be achieved by the development and implementation of a large-scale crime victimisation survey of international students and other Australian migrant populations more broadly. To better understand which risk factors, including racial appearance, are most influential in crimes against international students, further targeted research is required to more accurately assess offender motivations. Such research will prove invaluable for improving the safety (both real and perceived) of students who come to Australia to study and indeed all migrant and ethnic groups in Australia.”

Australia’s failure to seriously address the racist dimension of the 2009 crisis added to the Indian public’s fears of a cover-up the issue. It also created a vacuum that is being filled by entertaining, but less than rigorous media examinations of the issue, like Dumb, Drunk and Racist. As one long-time observer of the Australia-India relationship put it, the failure to address such a significant theme in Indian perceptions of the crisis flew in the face of reality; a reality, he believed, in which the status of Indian students as a ‘visible minority’ made them a colour-coded target for petty thieves and thugs who believed they would be less likely to complain or have influence with the police. 41

40 Says a senior Australian diplomat, “We’re now a quite vibrant society that has remade itself ... but the legacy of that (White Australia) policy from 1901 to 1973 still sits there. So when we do make a mistake it’s understandable there is one perspective that says ‘Australia’s never changed.’” 41 Observation made by Robin Jeffrey in correspondence to the Taskforce. February 2012


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Were the attacks racially motivated?

The Australian Institute of Criminology delivered an open finding as to whether racism played a role in the assaults and robberies that affected Indian students in 2009-10. No comprehensive study has been undertaken but a discussion paper compiled by Professor Adam Graycar at the Australian National University highlights the social context in which the assaults took place. His paper notes that street crime victimisation is related to location, racial appearance, socio-economic status, and age and gender. Young people, especially males, are more likely to be affected as they are often out and about at times and places where attacks are more prevalent. People who are not fluent in English also have a higher risk factor. A survey of 4,000 people conducted by researchers from the University of Western Sydney in 2006 reported that 19 per cent of respondents had experienced verbal racism in Australia, while six per cent had experienced a physical racist assault. A larger survey by researchers from the same university found that 80 per cent of people polled believe there is racism in Australia and that action should be taken to reduce it. Graycar’s paper concludes that the problem is not specific to students, but part of a wider social issue that politicians are reluctant to acknowledge. “Perhaps over-influenced by the fact that there is no basic institutional racism in Australia, politicians often deny that racism is an issue.” Responding credibly when the problem flares up is made much more difficult by the fact that there is no official data about racially motivated crime, and no data on victims’ perceptions of whether such crime was racially motivated.

Source: Adam Graycar. ‘Racism and the Tertiary Student Experience in Australia.’ Occasional Paper 5/2010. The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Canberra. 2010

Social media’s arrival as a phenomenon was dramatically illustrated in 2009. Indian students used their smartphones as cameras to supply Indian media with their point of view. But the lack of any significant formal Indian media representation in Australia meant these narratives were unmediated by more sober, comprehensive analyses.

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The lack of full-time Australia-based journalists working for Indian news media outlets is a huge obstacle to creating an informed conversation between the two countries, and demands a more pro-active approach to deepening perceptions. For two proud democracies, Australia and India do little in terms of exchanges at the parliamentary and party level, and few media editors from either country get the chance to interact and exchange perspectives. Desk-bound editors are gatekeepers with a big say in what stories are run and where news-gathering resources are deployed. Facilitating their engagement with their Indian peers, and enabling them to witness the scale of the India story for themselves, will influence decision-making about where media organisations deploy staff in the region. A senior editors’ dialogue along the lines of a similar initiative organised by the Australia Indonesia Institute could facilitate such exchanges, and play a role in enhancing dialogue between media professionals in both countries. Parliamentarians and political parties with existing ties to British and American parties should explore avenues for similar tie-ups with India, or at least more frequent dialogues and delegation exchanges. The New South Wales Premier Barrie O’Farrell has pledged to visit India every year.

The ABC has maintained a South Asia correspondent, traditionally based in New Delhi, since the 1960s. But given the fractious history of the region, the journalist filling the role usually ends spending most of their time in Afghanistan, Pakistan and various trouble spots. This structural impediment to better coverage of India has, for at least 40 years, suggested that the story of India’s emergence as a great power is less important to Australia than the mischief and agonies that afflict some of its smaller, less democratic nations. Nothing could be more untrue. We look forward to the day when the New Delhi correspondent of a typical Australian news organisation reports exclusively on events in India, much as correspondents posted to Beijing are permitted to spend the vast majority of their time covering China.

At a time when the media has never been so important in forming public perceptions, building strong, flexible relationships with journalists and television media professionals is critically important. Key initiatives like DFAT’s International Media Visits programs continue to play an important role; they must be maintained, or expanded. It is encouraging to see DFAT once again hiring media professionals to provide competent public affairs management at some diplomatic missions. The diplomats who replaced them with the demise of the former – and by then admittedly anachronistic Australian Information Service in the 1990s – never seemed comfortable in the role. At $5 million annually, the public diplomacy budget of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade borders on the farcical, and needs to be increased substantially. It is currently dribbled out across dozens of embassies around the world; a better idea would be to spend it in a focused manner on priority countries. When Australia embarks on important initiatives to boost cutting edge scientific collaborations, such as the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund, it fails to adequately promote and publicise them. The AISRF is Australia’s largest fund dedicated to bilateral scientific research


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with any country, and is one of India’s largest sources of support for international science, but is little known among ordinary Indians.

Fortunately, there are signs that Australia’s media is beginning to ‘get’ India –especially the economic watershed experienced there in the past two decades. In the early 1990s, coverage of India in the Australian media consisted largely of stories of political violence, corruption, sectarian conflict, separatism, poverty, natural disasters and cricket. But an analysis of reports about India published in one newspaper in 2010-11 shows a very different mix of coverage. In raw numbers, stories about cricket still dominate, but this partly reflects the nature of the game (five-day Test matches, a long World Cup, and frequent updates). Increasingly, however, it’s the story of India’s economic and geopolitical rise making headlines:

Figure 4: India in the News – Sydney Morning Herald Sept 2010 – Aug 2011*42

Cricket 170

Business 100

Social/Culture 35 (inc. old culture, new society)

Aust-India 20 (inc. education)

Geopolitical/Defence 36

Indian politics 9

General news 35

* Measured by number of stories of any length published during the period, which included a cricket Test match and One Day India-Australia cricket series. Figures are approximations, and story categories may overlap.

Unfortunately, it does not take much to trigger a reversion to old stereotypes in media reporting. Coverage of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi illustrated this phenomenon. As Graeme Innes observed, “Immediately prior to the Delhi Games, the western media banged on and on about event preparedness and Organising Committee crisis talks. Then, over the ten days of the Games themselves, they continued to commentate about toilet blockages, poor water quality, gastric complaints, insects and a lack of reliable transport for athletes. The sub-text is always the same – India is still backwards. But the fact is, India is predicted to soon be the second biggest economy in the world.”43 He could have added that all the worst predictions of disaster about the event never eventuated.

Profound changes in media landscapes globally have complicated the environment in which policy and perceptions are formed. Nowhere have these changes impacted more than India, with its vigorous democracy and passion for debate. 42 Perceptions Taskforce data obtained by a search on the Sydney Morning Herald website www.smh.com.au43 Graeme Innes, ‘Humanity, Equality and Destiny?’ The Drum, ABC 15 October 2010

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For the Sydney Morning Herald’s foreign editor, Connie Levett, the Indian student story taught Australia that “India is not a country to be taken for granted. It’s a country that’s learning to use its power.”44

The collapse of the state media monopoly in India, and its replacement by hundreds of independent commercial broadcasters, has created intense competition for ratings. Sensational Fox News-style coverage is a favoured means of attracting Indian eyes. On slow news days, problems encountered by Indians anywhere in the world can become news and ignite nationalist indignation, problematising India’s relations with the countries concerned. The contrast with China, where official media reliably reflects government policies, illustrates the irony that relations between democracies can be more difficult to manage.

Signs of an awakening

Once a testing ground for British atomic bombs, Australia has for at least three decades been consistently critical of nuclear proliferation, including nuclear testing. Strong public concern about the issue has seen all political parties oppose such tests, and although Australia holds 40 per cent of the world’s uranium deposits, there is only a meagre political constituency for the development of a civilian nuclear power industry. Even the export of uranium is denounced by influential figures in the ruling Australian Labor Party. So in November 2011, when Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced she would attempt to persuade her party to exempt India from a ban on selling uranium to non-signatory nations of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), it reflected not only considerable political courage but also increased understanding of the potential importance of India to Australia’s economic and geo-political future. Despite vociferous opposition from within her own ranks, and outside, Gillard realised her ambition at the ALP’s December 2011 national conference.

44 Interview with Connie Levett, Foreign editor, Sydney Morning Herald. Sept 2011.


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“It wasn’t just a question of uranium. It was really a question of how it was perceived in India ... the symbolism of that, if you like, in terms of how Australia looked at India as a strategic partner. We deeply appreciated Australia’s support at the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the I.A.E.A for the waiver that got us the (India-United States) civil nuclear co-operation agreement ... strategic circles in India perhaps were a little surprised that Australia didn’t follow with a civil nuclear co-operation agreement itself when ten other countries had. But it has happened, finally.”

- Mrs Sujatha Singh, Indian High Commissioner to Australia in 2009-10.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvhuBeg-yZg

At different times over the past decade, both sides of Australian politics have allowed nuclear issues to overshadow the need for closer ties with India. The Howard government’s outrage over India’s 1998 nuclear tests saw relations downgraded, but by the time the error had been admitted, Labor was in power and uranium became the sticking point.45 But in 2011 – unlike 1998, when India tested nuclear weapons – Australian opinion leaders spoke out publicly in India’s favour in the critical weeks leading up to the party conference. They stressed that although India had remained outside the NPT, it had a better non-proliferation record than NPT signatory China. India’s security interests as a nation sharing borders with two nuclear weapons states – Pakistan and China – were aired, as was its irritation with being lectured by Australia, a nation whose security is guaranteed partly by the United States nuclear deterrent. Resources minister Martin Ferguson also reminded national radio audiences that some 400 million Indians had no access to commercial energy sources, and that nuclear power was slated to play a significant role in ameliorating their plight. In 1998, when India’s then High Commissioner to Canberra (and member of the taskforce which produced this report) G. Parthasarathy rose to defend India’s position, he was an effective but lonely voice. In 2011, for the first time, India’s point of view on a major and difficult issue was understood in influential quarters in Australia.

Australia’s Federal Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop has written that “Australia is yet to fully come to terms with India’s regional and global significance and why a deeper and stronger relationship is in Australia’s national interest”. 46 But with the passing of a ‘lost decade’ in Australia-India relations there is now a bi-partisan understanding in Australia of the critical importance of deeper relations with New Delhi. Cynics will point out that this apes a similar – and

45 In 1998, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade downgraded India from a branch to a section

within its internal structure.46 Julie Bishop, ‘Charting the future of Australia-India relations.’ Australian Polity. Vol. 2 No. 5 http://australianpolity.com/australian-polity/charting-the-future-of-australia-india-relations

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earlier – change in the posture of the United States, and reflects little more than Australia’s notorious hunger for markets in which to sell its resources and services, and perhaps concerns about the rising power of China. While both factors have undoubtedly influenced Australia’s approach, the changes also reflect a slow maturing of Australian engagement with Asia as a whole, in the context of the relative decline of US power in the region. The context is significant, not because the American alliance has had its day – the recent decision to the permanently rotate 2,500 US Marines through a new base in northern Australia shows its continuing relevance – but because of how it alters the dynamics of Australia’s bilateral relationships in the region. Amid long-term strategic uncertainty, Australia is hedging its bets on the future power realities in its region. More pragmatic and more direct dealing with Asian powers is the likely outcome.

The expansion of Asian ancestries within Australia’s population is making past debates about the Aus tralian identity – whether or not we are an ‘Asian’ nation, and so on –redundant. As Asia’s economic growth, infrastructure development, and even social reform agendas in some areas, begin to outpace Australia’s, old views – and assumptions of superiority – will increasingly be challenged.47 A new consciousness of Australia’s place in the world and its region that goes beyond previous trade-led engagements is required, and in this respect, the nation that will place the heaviest call upon Australia’s attentions will be India. This is not only because genuine engagement with India has been so long delayed, but also due to India’s own absorbing and at times ambiguous complexities, both domestic and geopolitical.

Australians need to stop seeing India as a problem requiring an aid project, but start seeing it as a mega-nation whose economic and security needs will transform the world in the 21st century. As a country of over a billion people, India has many problems, and if it seeks our help we’re sure to provide it. But for Australia to prosper and grow, it needs to learn from India as well as help it, and the hardest lesson to learn may be that Australia needs India more than India needs us.

47 Christopher Kremmer, ‘Chugging behind high-speed China.’ Sydney Morning Herald 2 July 2011. Kremmer writes “Once upon a time many Asians looked to the West as the ideal of progress and prosperity. But as Asia develops and they achieve things we can only dream of, the focus shifts in the opposite direction.”


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Perhaps the greatest perception problem afflicting the Australia India relationship is the myth that we know one another already. We don’t. At the level of broad public opinion, understanding is at the level of the cartoon.48 As Brian Stoddart has written, “Australia still generally considers India as a poverty-stricken, bureaucratically driven and corrupt place, despite all the massive changes since the economic shifts that date from 1991”, an assertion borne out by opinion surveys and media coverage of India. 49 For Australia to secure its place in its dynamic region, a deeper understanding of, and sensitivity to the histories, politics, economies and cultures of our northern neighbours is essential. The Taskforce believes that Australia’s schools and universities are the place to begin rebuilding the nation’s India literacy. It’s imperative that the Australian Curriculum offer school students exposure to the history and contemporary realities of India, and Asia more generally. As one scholar has pointed out, only two percent of Australian school children opt to study Asian history. Given the region’s importance to Australia’s future, Asian studies, including the study of Indian history, should be more vigorously encouraged, and if necessary, mandated.50

48 “Australia has relatively shallow knowledge reservoirs about India now, and that has an impact on the way in which India figures in the popular imagination.” – Brian Stoddart in India and Australia: Bridging Different Worlds. (Eds.) Brian Stoddart and Auriol Weigold. Readworthy Publications. New Delhi. 2011. p 126

49 ibid. p.129 -- Simon Anholt, Nation Brand Index comparison of Indian and Australian attitudes to each other http://www.simonanholt.com/Research/research-introduction.aspx 50 “In modern history classes, year twelve, people that do history in the final exams, only two per cent opted to do Asian content.” Professor Andrew MacIntyre, ANU College of Asia & the Pacific. Big Ideas. ‘Q & Asia: Where is Asia headed?’(ABC Television) 14 July 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Gwd7FuACs

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INDIA LITERACY?

It’s surprising some of the Indian content you can find in the Australian Curriculum. Aussie school kids as young as eight are reading The Ramayana, learning to tie saris and investigating the challenges of improving water quality in the Ganges River. Unfortunately, little of it is mandatory under the national curriculum. It’s the states, not the Federal Government, who implement education policy. If they choose not to invest in equipping teachers with knowledge and materials about India, not much happens. Today’s reality is that whether students are India-literate or not depends on the motivation of individual teachers to access and use some of the excellent India materials distributed by the Melbourne-based Asia Education Foundation. Teachers are eager to deepen their India knowledge and Victoria has established a sister-state relationship with Karnataka, which allows some of its teachers to visit India and interact with Indian colleagues. But this, and a similar initiative by the Australia India Council, are the exceptions, rather than the rule. Until the national curriculum specifies and mandates the teaching of Indian and other Asian content, and skills up our teachers, Australia’s hopes of increasing Asia literacy will be a good idea that never got done. In the 1960s, 40 per cent of Australian school leavers studied at least one foreign language. Today, it’s around 13 per cent. The Federal opposition leader Tony Abbott has vowed to return schools to that 40 per cent high watermark. But here’s the catch—there aren’t nearly enough qualified language teachers to reach his goal. And unlike the 1960s, having studied a foreign language is no longer a requirement for entering university. The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is preparing for the day politicians find the will to make things happen. ACARA is developing curricula for Chinese and Italian courses. Now Hindi is also being mentioned for the first time as one of 11 languages whose teaching will be ‘supported’, but not mandated. The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians agreed by State and Federal Education ministers in 2008 stated that “Global integration and international mobility have increased rapidly in the past decade … India, China and other Asian nations are growing and their influence on the world is increasing. Australians need to become ‘Asia literate’, engaging and building strong relationships with Asia.” But only when Australian parents insist that schools imbue children with the cross-cultural knowledge they need to participate in the globalised 21st century world will real change happen.


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In 1989, fifteen of Australia’s nineteen universities offered intensive South Asian studies.51 Unfortunately, this flowering of expertise predated the convergence of geopolitical interests now underway, and was allowed to wither on the vine as North and South-East Asia took precedence. While much has been done to upgrade China-focused research and teaching in our universities, Indian studies still lag behind, and the case for a substantial increase in funding of undergraduate teaching positions and higher research funding is unarguable.

Australia’s international student program, for all its faults, has provided a high quality education and life enhancing experience for many Indians who have participated in it at a formative stage in their lives. It is essential that this initial exposure be converted wherever possible into a life-long association between our two countries. Tertiary institutions without highly effective alumni associations open to Indian students should be firmly encouraged to establish and maintain these bodies; they are a crucial factor in maintaining long-term friendship and engagement. Australian states also need to lift their game in protecting Australia’s international reputation. Those desiring access to the benefits of the international student visa system should undergo a form of annual accreditation to maintain and improve the standard of programs and security and general welfare of students. An element of competition between states in this regard would tone up the whole system, with potential benefits for domestic students as well.

More so than in the past, notes a leading scholar, “academic insight and understanding needs to be transferred fully into the political and commercial worlds where the potential for misunderstanding has been manifest demonstrably.”52 While important reforms allowing foreign universities to set up campuses have been delayed in India’s parliament, opportunities for research collaborations are many in areas of mutual interest, such as earth sciences, land and water management, and Indian Ocean studies. Says Robin Jeffrey, “We need to teach and research more about India in our universities. The barrenness of Australian knowledge of Indian history and custom has been glaring in the media and official circles eversince the ‘Indian student question’ hit the headlines.”53

Australian students must be encouraged and given more opportunities to undertake their studies in India, and more broadly, in Asia. Travelling as a backpacker can be an excellent grounding in the cultures of Asia, but Australia as a nation needs more. Government can provide crucial leadership by setting a benchmark that locks in a commitment to funding this important part of

51 Hamish McDonald. ‘India: Beyond the sea wall.’ The Asialink Essays. June 2009. No.4. p.6. McDonald notes that “ ... much of the early work of the Subaltern Studies collective was based at Australian National University in Canberra, and researchers such as A.L. Basham, Ravinder Kumar, D.A.Low, Robin Moore, Robin Jeffrey, Tom Weber and Peter Reeves achieved global recognition for their scholarship.”52 India and Australia: Bridging Different Worlds. (Eds.) Brian Stoddart and Auriol Weigold. Readworthy Publications. New Delhi. 2011. p.223 53 Robin Jeffrey. ‘Australia-India: Re-imagining the relationship.’ Inside Story. Swinburne Institute for Social Research.15 Feb 2010. http://inside.org.au/australia-india/

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developing Asia literacy. We would suggest support for at least one Australian student to complete their degree or vocational or languages course in India for every 100 international students studying in Australia each year. On current figures, this would allow up to 3,500 Asian placements available to Australian students this year alone. Programs that encourage young Australian professionals and tradespersons to spend time working with Indian peers in that country’s expanding industries would cement people-to-people ties and enhance opportunities for collaborative enterprise. Australia’s opposition Liberal-National coalition party has pledged to create new opportunities for two-way exchanges to encourage more Australian students to study overseas as a core element of soft diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific region. A working holiday visa scheme allowing Australians aged under 25 to spend six months in India on secondment to local institutions and businesses, living and working on local pay and conditions, would also help raise the next generation of Australians’ understanding of contemporary India. India’s tourism industry would also benefit from granting visa on arrival to Australian visitors, as is currently the case for New Zealanders.

All differences between open societies will seem sharper in the 24-hour news television age, especially as sectional interests become adept at tailoring their propaganda to the needs of sensation-hungry media. The media storm that has plagued Australia-India relations in recent years has quietened. Individual cases of Indians becoming victims of crime in Australia are now noted in Indian media reports, but are no longer routinely sensationalised. However, the repetition of avoidable controversies over decades suggests a deep-seated malaise in the way Australian governmental agencies and departments, in particular, conceptualise and manage the India relationship. There is a need for better coordination and pre-emptive trouble shooting of this extremely important relationship, especially given its history of negative perceptions and problems that have arisen not just in India, but in Australia itself.

Realistically speaking, it will take decades for a genuine sense of closeness to develop around Australia-India relations, but the recent change in atmospherics augurs well. If, as forecast, India’s middle class expands in size to more than one billion people by 2039, its impact on Australia’s economy could rank with that of China and Japan.54 The developing economic relationship will increasingly provide ballast to steady the ship of state in choppy waters, with two-way trade currently running at $22 billion per annum, driven by India’s hunger for energy and other resources. Indian direct investment in Australia took a great leap forward with the Adani Group’s acquisition of a 99-year lease of the Abbot Point coal terminal in Queensland. The company plans to spend up to US$6 billion over the next three years to develop coal mines and a railway line linking them to the port. 55

India recently surpassed the United States to become Australia’s fourth largest export market, but Indian exports to Australia still lag badly.56 Indian

54 Julie Bishop. ‘Charting the future of Australia-India relations.’ Australian Polity. Vol. 2 No. 5 http://australianpolity.com/australian-polity/charting-the-future-of-australia-india-relations55 Anirban Chowdury. ‘Adani to spend $5.5bn on Australian coal assets over three years’ Wall Street Journal. 24 Feb 2012 56 http://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/fs/inia.pdf


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manufactured goods are widely bought – clothing is one example, and MRF tyres another – but where they do exist, their Indian origins are not a marketing point, while identifiably Indian ‘services’ of the kind provided by telephone marketing companies tend to irritate Australian consumers. In perception terms, brands matter, and the Taskforce looks forward to the day when Australians can and do choose to drive Indian-made family cars.

It is time to build an influential constituency for Australia in India around icons and champions of the relationship. Long time observers of Australia-India relations were struck by the lack of voices raised on Australia’s behalf in India during the student crisis. Either 60 years of building cultural and people-to-people ties through diplomatic and other contacts had been worthless, or the right people – those who could not be ignored – had not been befriended, or felt unable to take a stand. Clearly, this is not a problem that can be fixed overnight. The Indian community in Australia – which currently ranks as the 8th largest ethnic grouping – is vibrant and growing, but is yet to develop a critical mass; people who have a high profile, influence, and a stake in both countries are few.

Over time, there will be more, but for it become a more effective force in bilateral relations, the pool of Indian voices routinely available to government needs to be broadened out beyond the organised Indian ethnic community organisation contacts. The nexus between these organisations and politicians keen to garner block votes in their electorates and local councils has lowered the horizons both of the Indian community in Australia, and of Australia’s bilateral relationship with India. State governments are well placed to reinvent the way Australia and India engage, and they are doing so, partly by placing great emphasis on connecting to Indian high achievers in business, the law, media, IT and other fields.

Gesture of goodwill

Some gestures cost next to nothing, yet can generate significant goodwill at high levels of Indian society and government. Technically, France’s highest award is restricted to French citizens. But a ‘distinction’ of the Légion d’honneur is regularly bestowed on foreign citizens, and a number of Indians have been so honoured. Such acknowledgement, though purely symbolic in nature, touches the hearts of not just the awardees, but their families, professional peers and fellow citizens more broadly. Gestures like these build trust and affection between nations. Australia’s national honours system has occasionally bestowed awards on foreign citizens (Mother Teresa was made an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia, the nation’s highest honour, in 1982). However, the term ‘honorary’, when applied to foreign awardees, sounds somewhat half-hearted for an accolade, and the honorary awards are not announced with the national awards on January 1 each year. As a result, they attract little publicity in Australia or abroad.

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With the exception of cricket, MasterChef, and a few good books, much of Australian popular culture leaves Indians feeling confused or offended. There is, however, a hungry audience in India’s cities for world class cultural product of the kind Australian museums, art galleries, dance and opera companies, to name a few, create and exhibit. Travelling exhibitions from such institutions as the Bowral-based International Cricket Hall of Fame, or the National Gallery of Australia – including its collection of modern and post-modern art from around the world – would be welcome. Showcasing the best Australia has to offer need not mean projecting an archetypal concept of Australiana. We have Picassos and Pollocks, as well as Whiteleys and Williams that Indians would flock to see. Similarly, in intellectual discourse, there is enormous scope for expanding the range of annual lectures and conferences where not only bilateral interests, but Australian and Indian perspectives on the challenges facing the world, from climate change to globalisation, are aired.

When it comes to trust between nations – that most valuable perception of all in international relations – intelligence sharing is the gold standard. Unsurprisingly, given Australia and India’s history of niggling irritants over decades, defence and intelligence cooperation is presently of the mildest variety. India currently conducts joint naval exercises with the United States, United Kingdom, French and Russian navies, and patrols with the Indonesian and Thai navies, but not with Australia. There is, therefore, considerable scope for improvement, particularly in the Indian Ocean, which has become a crucial thoroughfare for global trade, especially in energy. One third of Australian exports are shipped from ports bordering the Indian Ocean, and after decades of neglect a large range of issues – including tsunami early warning and disaster relief, people smuggling, sea level rise, piracy and controlling over-exploitation of fisheries – are crying out for co-operative action in a region in which security architecture is limited. The Indian and Australian Defence ministers met in New Delhi in December 2011 and discussed, among other things, confidence building measures between their respective navies, including semi-government level 1.5 Track Dialogues, and the possibility of fully fledged naval exercises at some point in the future.57 In a possible sign of things to come, India was one of only a handful of countries given advance notice of Australia’s decision to allow a contingent of 2,500 United States Marine Corps to use northern Australia as a permanent operating base.

The simplistic view that all Indian Ocean cooperation is part of a China containment strategy ignores a simple truth; even if China didn’t exist, we would still need to cooperate with India on a wide range of issues. While Australia-India military cooperation will be predominantly naval in character – and the exchange of military attachés should reflect that – there is also scope for building friendly ties with the Indian Army. The two armies share surprising historical links forged during the time of empire – soldiers from both fought and died at

57 Rajeev Sharma. ‘India and Australia inch towards strategic partnership—Analysis’, Eurasia Review, 17 Dec 2011


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Gallipoli. Given Australia’s passion for military history, it’s not hard to imagine a fruitful sharing of interest in historical links with India’s military at the regimental level, particularly during the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli in 2015.

Says Robin Jeffrey, “The growth of an Indian student presence in Australia has been messy and tragic. But it heralds an important new chapter in Australia’s place in its region.”58 The emerging commonalities between Australia and India are more than mere matters of perception; they are perceptions rooted in objective reality. Recent political developments have created a space not just to counter poor perceptions, but to build positive ones. The old days of benign neglect are over. India and Australia have runs to score. In recent years, even the gentlemanly game of cricket got testy over alleged Australian ‘sledging’ of their Indian opponents during the 2008 Sydney Test match.59 Since then, Indian cricketers have at times given as good as they got. Once, Australian travellers in India were met by awestruck mobs of youth who invoked the names of Bradman, Taylor and Waugh. Now, Indians look Australians in the eye, and proudly remind us that they won the World Cup, and that Sachin Tendulkar has scored more Test centuries that any batsman in history. We should learn to value the brash self-confidence of a democratic nation that has overcome so many obstacles in order to rise. If we look hard enough, we might see a gleam of the same audacity that makes upstart Australians what we are.

58 Robin Jeffrey. ‘Australia-India: Re-imagining the relationship.’ Inside Story. Swinburne Institute for Social Research.15 Feb 2010. http://inside.org.au/australia-india/ 59 The late Peter Roebuck described the Australian cricket team as a “pack of wild dogs” for their “arrogant and abrasive” behaviour in the controversial Sydney Test in 2008. British-born Roebuck demanded the head of Australia’s captain Ricky Ponting, saying: “Make no mistake, it is not only the reputation of these cricketers that has suffered - Australia itself has been embarrassed.”

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RecommendationsThe Taskforce recommends that...

The Australian government should, in partnership with the States, education and corporate sectors and civil society institutions:

• Undertake as an act of goodwill to extend the visas of Indian students who were in Australia on February 8, 2010, and whose pathways towards permanent residency in Australia were affected by changes to immigration regulations in that year. Such extensions or issuance of alternative categories of visa should be granted for at least 12 months from December 31, 2012.

• Extend the post-study work entitlement currently enjoyed by international students at universities to all TAFE institutes and reputable private colleges offering vocational training.

• Initiate the training of adequate numbers of school teachers in the Hindi language in preparation for its introduction into the Australian Curriculum as soon as practicable. State and Federal education ministers should agree to specify areas of the curriculum in which Indian content must be taught, including Indian history, geography and culture. Re-establish language training for Australian diplomats posted to India.

• Expand the study of contemporary India at Australian universities by providing initial funding for twenty B-level university teaching/research positions for the next five years, after which the universities fund the positions.

• Seek talks with India on granting visa-on-arrival travel for Australians and developing a special category visa for young Australians wishing to work in India. Initiate talks on new visa categories that cut red tape for visits by leadership figures such as university vice-chancellors and deans, Supreme Court judges, holders of national awards such as the Padma Bhushan and Order of Australia.

• Encourage the nomination of more foreign nationals, including Indians, for the Order of Australia awards, and more vigorously publicise foreign recipients by announcing them on the same day as national award winners each year.

• Benchmark and fund scholarships for Australian university students to study in Asian nations to a maximum of one per 100 international students studying in Australia in any given year.

• Double the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s paltry public diplomacy budget of $5 million, with the additional funds earmarked to raising awareness in India of exemplary initiatives such as the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund.

• Modernise Australia’s approach to international broadcasting, with Australia Network (TV) and Radio Australia taking on a larger role as content providers to Asian broadcasters. Australia Network to retain close links with DFAT but funding and edititorial responsibility should rest with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.


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• Establish an Australia-India senior editors’ dialogue modelled on the Australia-Indonesia editors’ dialogue, with initial funding for four meetings, in New Delhi, Sydney, Mumbai and Melbourne over a six-year period.

• Introduce an Australian education rating system for States that provide education services to international students, encouraging them to prevent and/or speedily address problems that can damage Australia’s brand as an education provider by prioritising student safety, proper orientation, police liaison support, and the active involvement of local ethnic communities as contact points for international students, including Indians.

• Invite representatives of regiments of Indian troops who fought at Gallipoli to be Australia’s guests at the 100th anniversary commemorations of the campaign in 2015, and invite expressions of interest from documentary film makers interested in producing feature films and documentaries about the shared experiences of Indian and Australian soldiers at Gallipoli.

• Establish a permanent naval attaché position in the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, in addition to the existing defence adviser position, which can continue to rotate between Army, Navy and Air Force personnel. Begin negotiations for joint training exercises between Indian and Australian Special Forces, as currently exist between India and the United States.

• Fund the Australia India Institute to develop an online ‘one-stop shop’ website providing reliable information on all aspects of trade, diplomatic, educational, people-to-people cultural relations.

• Increase support and funding of major travelling exhibitions on art, history, heritage and sport to and from Australia and India, including the Bowral-based International Cricket Hall of Fame’s effort to mount offshore exhibitions in India.

• Expand the growing range of Australia-India annual lectures, such as the Gandhi Oration and Crawford Lectures to all academic disciplines and civil society sectors, and name one such lecture in honour of the late esteemed India expert A.L. Basham.

• Encourage Australian political parties to pursue formal dialogues and party-to-party relationships between the main political parties in each country; increase interactions between Australian and Indian State and Federal parliamentarians via delegations, conferences and staff exchanges.

• Fund the Australian Institute of Criminology to undertake ongoing research into racism and crime, with an initial reference to inquire into the high profile incidents that impacted on relations with Indian in 2009-10.

• Facilitate the entry of Australian Technical and Further Education institutions to provide training in India and other countries on a not-for-profit basis.

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• Offer India the use of Australian expertise in developing distance education and the virtual classroom.

• Create a web-based advertising campaign showcasing Indian students’ opinions on Australia as a place to study, live and work.

• Encourage Australian media organisations to revive regular staff exchanges with Indian media organisations.

• Enlist Tourism Australia to develop an India wedding package that will encourage Indian honeymooners to take their holidays here, and couples of any background to wed in grand Indian style at selected locations across Australia, including the Outback.

The Taskforce also recommends that...

The Indian government should:

* Propose institutionalised regular Prime Ministerial visits between New Delhi and Canberra. Establish a young political leaders program between India and Australia.

* Establish a naval attaché position at the Indian high commission in Canberra and open an Indian consulate in Brisbane in recognition of India’s economic interests in Queensland.

* Expedite the proposed restructuring of the territorial divisions of the MEA and split the 26-nation Southern Division, hiving off part of its mandate to a newly-constituted Indo-Pacific or Australasia Division that could include Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

* Explore potential for shared humanitarian assistance and technical capacity-building programs in third countries. Australia has an expansive humanitarian assistance and technical partnership program with several countries through AusAID. India’s new Development Partnership Administration (DPA) Division in the MEA seeks a similar institutional profile. They can combine and contribute financial, material or human resources for specific projects, perhaps for programs in less-developed states of the Commonwealth.

• Encourage the setting up of separate, track 2/track 1.5 taskforces and dialogues on Australia’s role in Indian energy and food security.

• Consider a policy of visa-on-arrival for citizens of Australia, which is currently available to citizens of New Zealand, among others.

• Encourage business associations such as the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and their member corporations to interact with their counterparts in Australia, and institute short-term work and exchange programs for young Australian and Indian professionals.

• Accepting that democracy is a common and cherished principle shared by both countries, encourage a track 2/track 1.5 taskforce dialogue on democratic capacity building, to explore possibilities of providing institutional and technical cooperation, including human resource training, to newly-emerging democracies in, for example, the Arab world.

• Encourage the Press Trust of India and Doordarshan to establish a stronger presence in Australia, with a more robust network of stringers or fully fledged correspondents.


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�e Australia India Institute is funded by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education formerly known as the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Copyright: Australia India Institute 2012ISBN: 978-0-9872398-3-9

The Taskforce wishes to thank the following for their kind assistance with the project:

Amit Dasgupta, Karen Lanyon, Ruth Pearce, Auriol Weigold, Robin Jeffrey, Karan Thapar, Suvi Dogra, Michael Wesley, Sujan Chinoy, C. Raja Mohan, Brian Stoddart, Louise Merrington, Maxine Loynd, Ian Macintosh, Suman Dubey, Connie Levett, Tom Hyland, Matt Wade, Chris Snedden, Neville Roach, Mike McCluskey, Rory Medcalf, Bruce Dover, John Westland, Kathe Kirby, Greg Sheridan, Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Jacyl Shaw, Indrani Bagchi and Susanna Nelson.

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beyond the lost decade - australia india institute · report of the australia-india institute -...

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