Melbourne: A 23-year-old Indian student was beaten up for the second time in a fortnight by a group of youths in Melbourne, the 11th person from the community to be assaulted within a space of a month in Australia.
Kamal Jit was found unconscious and bleeding by another Indian student in western suburb of the city on Sunday. It was the second attack in two weeks on Jit, who was previously pelted with eggs by several masked men after getting off a late night train at St Albans station in western suburb.
"It is very bad because we pay a lot of money and we are living far away from our country and from our families and we have no protection," Jit was quoted as saying in The Agenewspaper on Monday.
Jit said that as he walked home late night on Sunday he noticed three men acting suspiciously in a car and he tried to avoid them. Two men came out of the car near and another waited in a car. "The two guys pushed me to the ground and I was hit on the head, I think with a steel rod," Jit said.
The latest attack may worsen the fears of Indian students, who have suffered a wave of allegedly racist attacks.
Gautam Gupta, head of Federation of Indian Students, demanded better security for community students.
"The Australian Police has said that their are 100,000 Indian students and a 100,000 police officers can't be employed to give them protection. There isn't much of an option left except self defence, and we are seriously considering endorsing it," he said.
"As someone living in Australia for the last 10 years, I haven't seen so much crime and experienced so much fear that I have in the last one or two years. It's not an increase in crime but an increase in reporting these crimes," he told CNN-IBN.
About 200 Indian students and their supporters marched from the Town Hall to Hyde Park in Sydney on Sunday to protest against the wave of allegedly racist attacks targeting them, which have created outrage in India and threaten Australia's $16 billion education export industry.
The Australian government has set up a task force under National Security Adviser Duncan Lewis to coordinate its response to the spate of attacks on Indian students in the country.
There have been at least 10 attacks on Indian students in the past one month. The latest racist attack came when a car belonging to an Indian student was torched in Melbourne on Saturday night by suspected drug addicts. While police have ruled out a racial motive, the student has said it was a racial attack.
Vikrant Rajesh Ratan, 22, told police that his car and two other cars belonging to Indians in the apartment complex where he lives were burnt by some drug addicts whom he had refused to give money.
Here's a look at some of the cases of alleged racial abuse in australia in the recent past. locally, they are called curry crimes.
- On June 2, a 20-year old nursing student, Nardeep Singh, was cornered by six men demanding cigarrettes in a car park. He was then slashed with a knife.
- 25-year-old Baljinder Singh was robbed and stabbed in Melbourne on May 25.
- On May 24, 21-year-old Shravan Kumar and his three Indian friends were attacked with screwdrivers by a group of drunk teenagers.
- On May 9, 21-year old Sourabh Sharma was assaulted in a train by a group of thugs who asked the boy to give them a cigarette.
- On May 20, 2008, cab driver Balraj Singh was attacked by two men who had hired his cab.
- In April 2008, a 23-year-old Indian student, Jalvinder Singh, was stabbed four times in the chest. Jalvinder was working as a part time cabbie in Melbourne.
(With inputs from PTI)
Comments
0 comment