Australia has set up a group to look into recent violence against Indian students that has threatened ties with the South Asian giant, Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said.
Smith said he had discussed joint concerns over the attacks with his Indian counterpart S.M. Krishna in London on Wednesday, including the Jan. 2 stabbing murder of Nitin Garg in Victoria state.
“I appraised him of the formation of the high-level working group between the Commonwealth and Victoria to deal with these matters and I undertook to keep him regularly provided with information on investigations and prosecutions as they come to hand,” Smith told reporters on Thursday.
Diplomatic tensions between Canberra and New Delhi have mounted following the unsolved murder of 21-year-old Punjab man Garg in Melbourne, with New Delhi expressing “absolute displeasure and concern” over the violence.
Smith said Australia did not want the issue to hurt ties.
“We resolved this was a difficult issue which we did not want to get in the way of the good and strong bilateral relationship between Australia and India which we’ve taken to new levels in the last couple of years,” Smith said.
Australian police have acknowledged a jump in the number of attacks against Indians in Victoria, but said they were not all racially motivated.
The latest violence, which follows a string of attacks against Indians that spilled over into street protests in Sydney and Melbourne last year, threatens to damage Australia’s US$15.4 billion education export industry.
Indian students account for 19 percent of total international enrollments in Australia, taking 117,000 places in the 12 months to last October.
CURRYING FAVOR
Meanwhile, Australians are being urged to eat Indian food in a campaign dubbed “Vindaloo Against Violence” to show their opposition to dozens of attacks on Indian students.
Melbourne woman Mia Northrop, who organized the campaign, said she was encouraging people all over Australia to take part in the unusual protest on Feb. 24.
“The idea is that you just go to your local Indian restaurant and just dine on Indian food as a way of embracing the Indian community,” Northrop told local radio. “You can have this show of force that thousands of people are doing this same thing at the same time.”
Northrop said she was amazed at the response “Vindaloo Against Violence” had received, with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd following progress on a Twitter stream. Participants are being asked to register on a Web site beforehand.
“We’ve got people from Tennessee and Vancouver and Singapore and Hong Kong saying: ‘We’re going to do it here,’” she said.
Police in New South Wales state this week arrested three people over the murder of another Indian citizen, 25-year-old fruit picker Ranjodh Singh, whose partially burned body was found beside a rural road last month.
Police said the murder was not race-related.
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