By IANS,
Sydney : There have been at least 20 incidents of “curry bashing” in Sydney in the past month, but most attacks on Indian students went unreported out of fear, a community leader has revealed.
Yadu Singh, a cardiologist, said violent attacks against Indian people are on the rise in Sydney.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Singh as saying that there had been more than 100 attacks on Indian students in the past 12 months.
Singh said the attackers knew the victims were unlikely to report incidents.
According to him, many Indian students feared that lodging a formal report to police would harm their chances of permanent residency.
The Indian consulate in Sydney has formed a committee to address the concerns about the welfare of students in Australia, said 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,” Singh was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
Singh also said he was aware of numerous robbings and random bashings of Indian students at night and in daylight, on trains and near their homes, often in western Sydney.
He referred to a Sunday night incident when a hospitality graduate, Rajesh Kumar, received 30 percent burns after a petrol bomb was flung into the Harris Park home that he shared with other Indians.
According to Singh, the attacks had been happening for about four years, and were a mixture of opportunistic robberies and outright racist attacks.
“There’s a name for this, ‘curry bashing, let’s go curry bashing’,” he said. “They are not random at all; people are targeting them. They know these students are easy targets.”
Two 18-year-olds faced a Victorian court late last year after a man was killed in such an attack. The court was told that seven friends had met at a McDonald’s on Jan 22 and decided to go out and bash an Indian.
In New South Wales charges were laid this week against six youths, aged 12 to 16, involved in what police said were unprovoked attacks on foreign students at Newcastle University.