Sydney, May 29 (Inditop): The Indian Government has been forced to take steps to assure the safety of Indian students in Australia after a series of attacks on them, a community leader has said.
Dr. Yadu Singh said there had been at least 20 bashings of Indian students in Sydney in the last month alone, but most went unreported out of fear. He estimated over 100 attacks on Indian students in the last 12 months.
“There’s a name for this … ‘curry bashing’, ‘lets go curry bashing’. They are not random at all and the people are targeting them. They know these students are easy targets,” he said.
The revelations follow a strong response by the Indian Government to an apparently racially motivated attack on four Indian students in Melbourne, which left one student fighting for his life in hospital.
Under instructions from the Indian Government, the Indian Consulate in Sydney has formed a committee to address the concerns about the welfare of Indian students in Australia, said Dr Singh, who is the head of the committee.
“Melbourne has a bigger problem but if we don’t do something in Sydney it will be repeated here,” The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Dr Singh, as saying.
He said he was aware of numerous robbing and random bashings on Indian students at night and in daylight, on trains and near their homes, often in western Sydney.
On Sunday evening, hospitality graduate Rajesh Kumar received burns to 30 per cent of his body when a petrol bomb was thrown through the window of the Harris Park home he shared with other Indians.
Dr. Singh said the attacks had been happening for about four years, and were a mixture of opportunistic robberies and outright racists attacks.
Many students were also afraid that lodging any sort of formal police report would harm their chances at permanent residency.
“So they will suffer the humiliation and the insult … and the criminals think: We are pretty safe robbing them and nothing will happen,” Dr. Singh said.
