‘Indian persecution’ fears a myth

While, in common with many Australians, I have been appalled at the Government’s desperate attempts to keep 157 asylum-seekers out of the country by detaining them on the high seas, I find myself in agreement with the Minister for Immigration, Scott Morrison, when he says Indian citizens on board the boat are most likely economic migrants.

To qualify as refugees there has to be a genuine fear of persecution in the country from which they are fleeing. So what is the nature of the persecution taking place in India today that forced these Indians onto boats to make the perilous sea voyage to Australia?

I have lived and worked in India, most recently to cover the elections there. The poll did not pass off without incident – the worst being deadly attacks on Muslims by tribal separatists in Assam State – a remote area in the north-east where things sometimes get out of hand.

Elsewhere there were brawls between opposing groups of supporters, name-calling and angry threats occurred at the highest level, but in the major cities there were more deaths from heart attacks in the extreme heat than there were from any systematic inter-racial or inter-religious violence or persecution.

This is not to say that India does not have problems. There were times in the recent past when claiming refugee status might have been acceptable: After the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat or in the massacres of Sikhs that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.

In addition, one third of the world’s extreme poor live in the country and its death rate for under-fives is the highest in the world. The nation is grappling with these continuing problems and initiatives to at least begin the task of addressing them are a high priority of the newly-elected Government led by Narendra Modi.

This work is not helped when India’s image is tarnished by attention-seekers such as refugee lawyer David Manne and Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young who are quite happy to imply that India is a country that persecutes its citizens in order to further their respective agendas.

I have no definite knowledge of the circumstances that led to the refugee boat putting to sea from the coastal city of Pondicherry in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu last month. However, it appears the vast majority of those on board are ethnic Tamils. Some are Indian citizens; others appeared to have fled to India from Sri Lanka, where they would have had well-founded fears of persecution under the Rajapaksa regime.

It seems quite likely that when the people smugglers negotiated a deal to take the Sri Lankan Tamils to Australia, a few members of the local community saw an opportunity to try their luck by going along for the ride, hence Morrison’s probably well-founded suspicions of economic migration.