Photo: Anti-immigration protesters on 31 August 2025 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
In recent months, the Indian diaspora in Australia has been jolted by a surge in xenophobia, hate-crimes, and anti-immigration rhetoric that seems unnervingly familiar. What feels new is not the underlying disease, it is its global spread.
Indians have been living, for decades, with political narratives built around “us vs them,” majoritarian identity, religious or caste-based polarisation, and fear of the Other. Now, many are seeing the same ingredients in Australia, in Europe, in North America. Fear and hatred sell fast, everywhere.
Thousands took part in anti-immigration protests in Australian cities under “March for Australia” banners. These rallies singled out Indian migrants, with flyers claiming, for example, “More Indians in 5 years than Greeks and Italians in 100.”
In Adelaide, a 23-year-old Indian student, Charanpreet Singh, was severely assaulted in what appears to have been a racially motivated attack, after what began as a parking dispute.
In Melbourne, there was a brutal machete attack on an Indian-origin man, reportedly carried out by teenagers. The victim was critically injured.
Racist vandalism: A Hindu temple and several Asian-operated businesses in Melbourne were defaced with racist graffiti.
Government and community responses have also made waves: The Prime Minister and others have condemned racist or divisive language.
In particular, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s public remarks linking Indian migration to political advantage for the Labor Party drew widespread condemnation. PM Anthony Albanese urged an apology, calling some of the rhetoric plainly hurtful.
The events in Australia resonate deeply with patterns long embedded in Indian political life. Over the past decade and more, India has seen a steep rise in hateful, communal rhetoric at rallies, via political leaders, and on social media.
The India Hate Lab’s 2024 Report records 1,165 verified in-person hate speech events a ~74.4% increase from 2023. Often these speeches cast minority religious communities as threats, extremists, or outsiders.
This kind of language activates fear and distrust. Alongside the speeches, there’s been a normalisation (or at least frequent recurrence) of communal riots, violence, desecrations of religious sites, and other hate-motivated actions.
Sometimes perpetrators get little accountability. “You vs. Them” has become a reliable frame: whether along lines of religion (Hindu vs Muslim), caste, language, region, or “outsider vs insider” narratives (e.g. immigrants, migrants, people from certain states).
Parties leverage fear of cultural change, of demographic threat, of losing dominance to mobilise votes. Sometimes the rhetoric crosses over into symbolic acts or praises (or non-punishments) for acts otherwise judged reprehensible.
There are instances of murderers or violent actors being celebrated (directly or by omission), or narratives that downplay acts of violence when committed by “our own.”
This helps normalise the extremes. (While direct comparisons must be made carefully, many report that violent speech or acts sometimes receive tacit acceptance in some political circles.)
Whether it’s fear of losing religious identity, fear of the “other,” or fear of demographic/cultural change, politicians and leaders have found that stoking fear works. It is visceral, immediate, easier to understand than nuance.
Once speech that demonises minorities, newcomers, or dissenters becomes commonplace, it infects social discourse what people feel comfortable saying, beliefs they assume others share, what gets ignored by the media or law enforcement.
Fear speech and hate get picked up, shared, monetized. Rumours, propaganda, even misinformation play into existing prejudices.
When identity politics works to deliver votes, there is little incentive for parties to back off. Even in democracies with strong institutions, the pressure to win tends to reward dramatic, divisive, attention-grabbing rhetoric.
For the Indian diaspora in Australia (and elsewhere), the stakes are high. Fear and hatred are powerful, but they are parasites: they feed on division, ignorance, apathy and grow if unchecked.
For many Indians, the phenomena we are seeing in Australia are not surprises: these are reflections of patterns deeply embedded in Indian political culture over decades.
If we are to build societies worthy of pluralism, justice, and respect, then being “the change we want to see” as Gandhi urged is no cliché. It is a necessity.
Only by holding fast to truth, fairness, and compassion, even when those values cost us, can we hope to blunt the spread of this hate-driven ideology.
The test is no longer only what’s happening back home it’s about what we do when the mirror shows up in cities far from our birth.
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