3 February 2010
Transcript of High Commissioner’s Interview with CNN IBN (Foreign Editor Surya Gangadharan)
Journalist: High Commissioner, there has been some forward movement on this…. we find that there are Indians now involved in the case of Ranjot Singh. In a sense do you feel vindicated about the stand that Australia has taken all through?
High Commissioner: I do not think this is a question of vindication and I do not think the involvement of Indians in and of itself is significant. What is significant here is the principle of not jumping to conclusions until the facts are in. And my concern all along has been that every one of these incidents has been presented as a racist attack, whether or not that is the case and I think what we have seen now in the two most recent sets of arrests is that the facts are coming in. And when the facts come in they may well show that this is not a case of a racist attack. Now I am not drawing any generic conclusion from this. I have said all along that some of these attacks are racist. That is apparent. We condemn it. We cannot see tolerance for it and we will punish it. Most of these attacks are urban crime but let us deal with them on a case-by-case basis. Let us draw conclusions based on facts not on jumping to conclusions.
Journalist: Do you feel that the media hounded you in that sense …Australians … you know after these attacks … in the sense that the media got after Australia?
High Commissioner: I am very cautious about making generic commentary on the media, because the media is very varied and it has a very mixed performance, both in Australia and in India. We both have the advantage of a very free and a very robust press. Clearly some of the coverage in India and in Australia has been sensationalist, unbalanced, assertive rather than analytical but there has also been quite a lot of very balanced and fair and accurate reporting here in India.
Journalist: Do you believe that the Indian Government has been fair enough in the way it has reacted to these attacks?
High Commissioner: I understand the pressures on the Indian Government. I understand why it is something that they need to take up seriously with the Australia. We share those concerns. We do not need any convincing that this is a serious matter, that needs to be addressed seriously and I think we have demonstrated already and we will continue to demonstrate, one that we take this seriously. Two, that we are going after the perpetrators, and three that our criminal justice system is fully capable of meeting out the appropriate punishment.
Journalist: Has it damaged Indo-Australian relations?
High Commissioner: I think it has certainly damaged our image. It has damaged the way Australia is perceived in India. That has been an unfortunate consequence of the nature of the coverage that we have had. I am hoping that we can minimise any damage to government-to-government relationship. The government-to-government relationship is a strong one. I think it has an enormous room to grow and that I would like to see it continue growing from strength to strength.
Journalist: High Commissioner, I know that the cases handled in Australia are in a separate domain altogether but on the other cases that were involving Indians, attacks on Indians … do you have any indication, any hints that you have been given that perhaps some of these cases could take a similar route, in terms of not turning out to be racist attacks as we see it here, but actually as being attacks by other Indians?
High Commissioner: I do not have any inside information on that, my point all along has been let us wait until the police have concluded their investigation and see what they have turned up. We will deal with these issues on a case-by-case basis. We will establish whether race has been a motive in the course of an investigation and our courts will deal with it.
Journalist: The visa rules that Australia has to followed with regard to Indians going there to study, have you tightened up these rules in the sense, are they now more restrictive?
High Commissioner: We have not tightened up rules. The rules remain the same. What we have done is we have increased vigilance with which we are policing these rules, because we want to ensure that the integrity of our visa processes are maintained and in the course of that, we have discovered higher levels of fraud than we had anticipated. As a result, the rejection rate for visas is going to go up. That’s just purely a factor of the application of the existing rules to the applications.
Journalist: This fraud relates to wrong kinds of fake documents being sent in?
High Commissioner: Well, it can take a number of forms, they can be documentary fraud, they can be assertions made in an application which turn out not to be true. It may be the case that the requirement that we have for students to demonstrate that they have sufficient money in the bank to cover their costs in Australia, that those bank accounts are not what they may seem and it may also be the case that those who are applying to study in Australia, when questioned about the nature of the course to which they are going, the institution that they intend to study in do not have a sufficiently clear understanding of what it is that they are going to, which may raise a question about whether their intention is to study or to do something else.
Journalist: Has there been any review of the kind of institutions offering the kind of courses that the Indians have gone for, the background of these institutions, their credibility?
High Commissioner: Absolutely. We have conducted that. This is a matter for our state governments. We have conducted rapid audits to establish whether these institutions are meeting the criteria under which they were registered and in many cases we have found that they have not and we have closed those institutions down. We have also introduced the legislation to tighten up the criteria and that will mean that we will have a higher level of confidence that if a private institution advertises a course, that it is in a position to deliver what it promises.
Journalist: Given the fact that we have had reports that Australia has gone to see a fairly net loss in terms of the number of students from India queuing up to, do you see that trend being reversed at any point, do you believe that?
High Commissioner: In the long term, I am very confident about the India- Australia education relationship. We will take a dip this year, it will probably be a substantial dip, but I think what’s operating here are the laws of supply and demand. I think India is on a high growth path. It is recognised that it is upgrading skills as a national priority and Australia is well placed to assist India in that project. So I think the long- term future of this education relationship is going to be very strong. But we want to build it on a quality foundation. We want to build it on a sustainable foundation and we want to build it on the basis of an education objective and not something else.
Journalist: Now we have had senior Australian officials including the former Commissioner of Police in Victoria admitting that there is a problem in a way some Australians look at Indians. Now is there some way in which your State Governments are going around to tackle this?
High Commissioner: Well no country is free of racism and I think a number of Australian leaders will acknowledge that there are some in Australia who harbour views which would, I think, find to be abhorrent by the vast majority of Australians. That is a fact of life in Australia and it is probably a fact of life in many other countries as well. But the overall approach in Australia and the overall sense of the Australian community is to welcome immigration, to welcome people from other countries, to make their home in Australia, if that is what they want or to come to study in Australia if that is what they want. We have built modern Australia on the foundation of immigration. We are today a very diverse country, culturally and racially, and we have done that I think with a measure of success and a degree of harmony which suggests that the innate approach of the individual Australian is a welcoming and an open minded one.
Journalist: Sir, Thank You
High Commissioner: Thank You.