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India, Australia and the Asian Century

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India, Australia and the Asian Century earless f nadia India, Australia and the The Fearless Nadia Occasional Papers on India-Australia Asian Relations The Fearless Nadia Occasional papers are original essays commissioned by the Australia India Century Institute focusing on various aspects of the relationship between India and Australia. Fearless Nadia (1908- 1996) was an Australian actress born Mary Ann Evans in Perth, Western Australia, who began her career working in the Zarko circus and eventually became a celebrated star of Hindi films in India. Fearless Nadia brought a new joie de vivre and chutzpah into Indian cinema with her breathtaking ‘stunts’. Her role in the Hamish McDonald renowned film Hunterwali, where she appeared dressed in boots and wielding a whip, became an iconic image in 1930s Bombay. The Occasional Papers series seeks to inject a similar audacity and creative dialogue into the relationship between India and Australia. Autumn 2013: Volume One www.aii.unimelb.edu.au The Fearless Nadia Occasional Papers on India-Australia Relations earless f nadia Editor CHRISTOPHER KREMMER Permission to use the name and image of “Fearless Nadia” is a courtesy extended by Wadia Movietone to the Australia India Institute for use only as the title of its Occasional Academic Papers. This is on the clear understanding that the name and image will be used only for the Occasional Academic Papers under this umbrella, and not for any commercial use. Wadia Movietone retains sole global copyright and ownership under intellectual property and copyright law of the Fearless Nadia and Hunterwali characters and personas, and any depiction and usage of the same. The Australia India Institute expresses its deep gratitude to Wadia Movietone for this gesture and wishes to record the contribution of JBH Wadia who thought up the Hunterwali character, gave Mary Evans her screen name, and popularized the Fearless Nadia persona through his films. The Australia India Institute, based at The University of Melbourne, is funded by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education, the State Government of Victoria, and The University of Melbourne. Copyright: Australia India Institute 2013 India, Australia and the Asian Century Executive Summary The immense public response to theAustralia in the Asian Century White Paper creates a moment for Australia to throw its energies behind its goals with India, at once the most familiar and the most exotic of the big emerging powers in the region. Australia’s government, business and academic circles must invest in informing themselves about modern India and in getting to know its leaders, through more exchanges and meetings and establishment of research and study institutes in India as well as Australia. Careful building of knowledge and relationships will avoid disappointments in this most complex country. Nothing in the White Paper dramatised the arrival of India in the forefront of Australia’s regional relationships more than the inclusion of Hindi among the four priority languages for teaching in schools (along with Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian). Hindi teaching in Australia’s schools will necessarily start from a low base, but the two existing Australian primary schools with Hindi language courses – Rangebank Public School in Melbourne’s Southeast and West Ryde Public School in northwest Sydney – and other community language teaching networks, provide models for the extension of Hindi teaching in our schools. Australia’s Indian diaspora, approaching half a million in size, is a pool of language and other expertise that should be tapped to assist in the roll out of the White Paper’s language policy on Hindi. Recent opinion polls suggest Australia’s image in India has recovered from its nadir after Indian students suffered the effects of violent street crime in Australia in 2009-10. Effective action by Australian law enforcement and education officials brought the problem under control, but more needs to be done to persuade the Indian public that Australia is safe for Indian students and that its education system, which Indians surveyed held in high esteem, welcomes them. Australian vocational training institutions also need to push ahead with plans to provide low cost skills training in India itself, where the potential scale of the market offers enormous opportunities to those who can offer courses at an attractive price and deliver them with the right partners. In the political and security realms, a window of opportunity has opened for Australia in India. This opportunity demands that we boost efforts to engage India’s leaders and administrators. Connections forged now will have beneficial effects for Australia and India for decades to come. earless f nadia 1 2 India, Australia and the Asian Century Hamish McDonald Due to its framing as a formal White Paper of the Australian Government, the Australia in the Asian Century report has so far been taken much more seriously than the many previous “wake up” calls for Australians to attune themselves to emerging realities in their region.1 Whether it follows the fates of those earlier efforts, lapsing from public consciousness as existing connections and cultural investments reassert themselves, remains to be seen. But the initial widespread acceptance of its premises is encouraging. The main criticism is not the direction, but the immediate lack of resource commitments to achieve the ambitious goals of building on Australia’s strengths through further reform. The White Paper suggests that this be done by developing Asia-relevant capabilities including languages; connecting to Asian markets through corporate and institutional relationships; building an inclusive security regime in the region; and developing deeper, broader relationships with the nations of Asia. In the White Paper, India is the big new inclusion in Australia’s outlook on Asia. Since it gained independence in 1947, India has periodically been “rediscovered” by Australian prime ministers, but has tended to be categorised quite differently from East Asian countries that have pursued export-led growth. India in its South Asian setting has been seen as an economic and strategic region unto itself. That has changed only recently with large-scale Indians investments in, and export contacts for, Queensland coal. Over almost the same short period, Australia has found itself with a very large, fast-growing Indian diaspora, and our political and business pundits have quickly caught on to the story of a rising India as a new pole of the global economy and regional power balance. But India - vast in population, showing great disparities of wealth and education, multi- lingual, multi-religious, nuclear armed and unaligned - remains a peculiar challenge for closer engagement. How then to take the White Paper forward with India? A three-step approach may assist in answering this question. The first step is to realise that the White Paper is about us, the Australians, rather than our Asian partners like India. The document is written to convince us that we need to do much more if we wish to piggyback on Asia’s growth. It is a deeply utilitarian document. Summarised crudely, it says that Australia needs to plug in to Asia’s rising economies because that’s where the biggest demand for our goods and services will arise as a consequence of the expansion of Asia’s middle-classes. 1 See David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, UWA Publishing, 2012. earless f nadia 3 To some, this mercantilist approach seems crude, somehow unbecoming of Australia. Others point out that Asian societies are also steeped in a history of trade and economic interdependency. Yet because the language of the paper is so blunt in this respect, it is not in itself a useful tool for Australian ‘soft diplomacy’ efforts in India, or other Asian countries. The sooner we move on from words to actions, the better. The second step is to look at what we already have with India. The oft-repeated list of “cricket, Commonwealth and curry” is actually shorthand for a level of affinity that our diplomats can only dream about with most other regional partners. The Commonwealth refers to our comparable institutions - parliaments, public services, courts and police, stock exchanges, banks and corporations, armed forces - built in parallel on British models over the last century and a half (though Australians must remember that we stood on a different side of the imperial fence from most Indians, who resisted British rule). Curry is the lure of Indian culture that has attracted many Australians from Alfred Deakin on. Cricket is a shared code of skill and honour, pulling in players and fans from all classes in both countries.2 On the one hand, these commonalities may serve as a cushion to help ameliorate the problems that arise from time to time in relations between nations. On the other hand, slow progress in ties between Australia and India over decades suggests they may have acted as a placebo, or substitute for a genuine partnership. The third step is to realise what we don’t have with India, and then set out to build it. It is this lack, which the White Paper does not explore in detail, that this paper will discuss. The missing links can be brought under three broad headings. • A deep knowledge base about India in Australia • More effective representation of contemporary Australia in India • A comprehensive strategic relationship based on close economic, political, security and cultural relations Australia needs to develop wider and deeper understanding of Indian history outside the imperial experience, including the Indian side of that experience. Our people and leaders should have a firmer grasp of India’s tumultuous political history post-1947 till today (beyond glimpses through the novels of Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie). We need to better understand the complexities of India’s economic and social development in the context of global markets, and its unique strategic perspectives.
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