Australia Confronts Transnational Hindu Nationalism

In mid-October an Indian man was quietly deported from Australia. Yet on arrival back in India he received a hero’s welcome, with a motorcade of cars draped in the Indian flag parading him through his hometown in Haryana state. In India, Vishal Jood wasn’t a convicted criminal; he was a patriotic warrior, unfairly victimized by a foreign government.

The episode highlighted both the nature of India’s Hindu nationalist politics and its transnational reach into diaspora communities.

Jood – a student in Australia – was arrested in April for a series of assaults on Sydney’s Sikh community in September 2020 and February 2021. A number of charges were brought against him, including that of a racial hate crime, but in a plea bargain eight of the charges were dropped in exchange for Jood pleading guilty to three counts of assault, occasioning actual bodily harm in the company of others, and being armed with intention to commit an indictable offense. He was sentenced to six months in jail.

Upon Jood’s deportation, Australian Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Alex Hawke released a statement that highlighted the gravity of the case. “The Morrison Government takes very seriously its responsibility to protect Australians from non-citizens who engage in criminal conduct,” Hawke declared. “We will always act decisively to protect our community. Attempts to undermine Australia's social cohesion will not be tolerated.”

The assaults Jood committed in Australia were driven by events in India. The passing of new agricultural legislation in September 2020 set off an ongoing series of protests in and around Delhi by farmers concerned about how the new laws will affect their livelihoods. Large numbers of these protesters are Sikh farmers from Punjab and Haryana. The protests in India have inspired sympathetic support from Sikh communities in Australia, something that many supporters of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have found offensive.

Driving this offense is an assumption that to protest the policies of the Indian government is to be hostile to the state of India itself. This is a misconception that ardent nationalists are prone to make. The BJP itself has tried to paint protesters as “Khalistani” (Sikh separatist) agitators, rousing up the party’s supporters and leading to acts of vigilante violence against protesting Sikh farmers.

As a political party built around an ideology of religious nationalism, the BJP inspires a certain fervor among its supporters that, when aroused, can be difficult to restrain. For these devotees, laws are not instruments to peacefully govern societies but impediments to a higher calling. It is this sentiment that spilled over into the streets of Sydney, leading to Jood’s attacks on the Sikh community and his subsequent conviction for assault.

This episode presents a wider problem for the Australian government. The significant growth of the Indian community in Australia has been a tremendous asset to the country, and warmly welcomed by most of the Australian public. However, the BJP has a unique approach to its politics where it actively seeks to cultivate an intimate relationship with the vast Indian diaspora. These people may not be able to vote in Indian elections, but they provide financial and ideological support to the party.

Yet if the knock-on effects of this form of diaspora engagement are acts of local violence that specifically target certain Indian Australian groups, then Australia has a considerable problem on its hands – not only in terms of the violence itself, but due to the potential for such assaults to lead to an unwarranted negative image of the India diaspora. Transforming the wider Australian public’s perception of Indian Australians from a highly successful and valued community into one driven by the political grievances and communal tensions of Indian domestic politics would be a great shame.

Since Australia reconfigured itself as a migrant nation following World War II, first with migration from Europe and subsequently from the rest of the world in the 1970s, there were certain social expectations placed upon its burgeoning multiculturalism. The most prominent expectation was that historical or political tensions between groups that existed in their countries of origin were not to be replicated in Australia.

For earlier waves of immigrants, this was an easier task as there was no global communications infrastructure to maintain these kinds of psychological investments. Holding this expectation of today’s Indian migrants, especially when the BJP has a mighty communications machine that has developed tentacles throughout the diaspora, may be far more difficult.

This episode of local communal violence comes at a time when Australia is working hard to forge much closer bonds with India. Protecting community support for this relationship would be considered vital for Australia’s foreign policy objectives, making Canberra very concerned about these kinds of complications.