Bharat Rakshak

harbans wrote:Can we encourage/facilitate Pakistani emigration to Australia? That would be a good check on Chinese ambitions in the long term.

I have said this before, India should not neglect immigration to Australia. It's a very big continent with lots of natural resources and a population of just 20m. If we think it's ok 30 years hence 30% of the population is paki/ Chinese we have no influence left whatsoever. People fail to see the demographic aspect which Chinese and Pakis see so well...

A senior Australian government minister said Friday that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd could call an early election if Parliament fails to pass his carbon trading program. The government is negotiating possible changes to the program with opposition lawmakers who control the upper house Senate. It is hopeful a deal can be brokered over the weekend.
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Australia is the biggest per capita polluter in the developed world, due mainly to the fact that it uses fossil fuels, chiefly coal, for around 90% of its electricity generation.

An Australian Senate Committee formed to investigate a series of violent attacks on Indian students this year has ruled out racism as the prime motive -- but Indian student groups say the authorities are in denial.

"There was very little evidence that the assaults were based on racism or discrimination," committee chairman and Liberal Party senator Gary Humphries has told The Australian newspaper.
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"The committee acknowledges that with a lack of understanding regarding personal safety, the circumstances in which international students often find themselves may give rise to fears of racism and they may interpret a negative experience as motivated by racism even though no such motive exists," an extract from the report reads.

The committee has recommended that overseas students should be given more information on personal safety before they arrive in Australia. The universities and colleges should be responsible for imparting this information.

The much-awaited Senate Committee report has come under immediate criticism for not addressing the thorny issue of 'racism'.

"They are still in denial of the major issue," Federation of Indian Students of Australia president Amit Menghani was quoted as saying by The Australian newspaper Friday.
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The Senate report, chaired by Liberal Senator Gary Humphries, has made a number of recommendations to reform the beleaguered Australian overseas education sector.

Australia's education exports have rocketed in the past few years but the sector is reportedly marred by lack of regulation of the education institutes and recruitment agents.

Asia's new strategic partners

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The recently concluded India-Australia security agreement has come at a time when tectonic power shifts are challenging Asian strategic stability. Asia has come a long way since the emergence of two Koreas, two Chinas, two Vietnams and a partitioned India. It has risen dramatically as the world's main creditor and economic locomotive. The ongoing global power shifts indeed are primarily linked to Asia's phenomenal economic rise.

Even so, Asia faces major challenges, as underscored by festering territorial and maritime disputes, sharpening resource competition, fast-rising military expenditures, increasingly fervent nationalism and the spread of transnational terrorism and other negative cross-border trends.

In that light, an expanding constellation of Asian countries linked by strategic cooperation and sharing common interests can help foster power stability and build institutionalized cooperation. A close India-Australia strategic relationship indeed is a critical link in this picture, given the common security interests in several spheres that bind the two democracies.

Unfortunately, the Indo-Australian relationship hasn't gone too well ever since Kevin Rudd two years ago became the free world's first Mandarin-speaking head of government. Among his first actions, he pulled the plug on the nascent India-Japan-Australia-U.S. "Quadrilateral Initiative" and reversed his predecessor's decision to export uranium ore to India. For reasons unrelated, the growth in Indo-Australian educational and defense ties also came under pressure, even as India remained Australia's fastest-growing merchandise export market.

Rudd's India visit last month has helped to put the bilateral relationship on an even keel and, more importantly, to elevate it to a strategic partnership. The new security agreement will help add concrete strategic content to the relationship.

Underlining the significance of their new accord, India and Australia have agreed to "policy coordination" on Asian affairs and long-term international issues, and to work together in Asian initiatives like the East Asia Summit and ASEAN Regional Forum. Toward that end, they will institute regular defense-policy talks, including consultations between their national security advisers, and set up a joint working group on counterterrorism. They also have agreed to cooperate on maritime and aviation security and participate in military exercises and other service-to-service exchanges.

Like the October 2008 Indo-Japanese security accord and the June 2005 Indo-U.S. defense agreement, the India-Australia declaration is a "framework" understanding that is to be followed by an action plan with specific steps. In fact, all these three bilateral accords call for advancing security cooperation in wide areas that extend from sea-lane security and defense collaboration to disaster management and counterterrorism.

The Indo-Japanese security agreement, signed when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Tokyo last, was modeled on the March 2007 Australia-Japan defense accord. Now, the India-Australia accord follows that lead. Its structure and even a large part of its content mirror that of the Japan-Australia and Japan-India declarations.

Actually, all three — the Japan-Australia, Japan-India and Australia-India agreements — are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation. And all three, while recognizing a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law, obligate their signatories to work together to build not just bilateral defense cooperation, but also security in Asia. They are designed as agreements to enhance mutual security between equals. By contrast, the U.S.-India defense agreement, with its emphasis on arms sales, force interoperability and intelligence sharing — elements not found in Australia-Japan, India-Japan and India-Australia accords — is aimed more at undergirding U.S. interests.

Paradoxically, Rudd, having nixed the Quadrilateral Initiative, has come full circle implicitly by plugging the only missing link in that quad — an Australia-India security agreement. With the Indo-Australian accord, quadrilateral strategic cooperation among the four major democracies in the Asia-Pacific region — Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. — is set to take off without the aid of an institutional mechanism like the Quadrilateral Initiative.

Such cooperation, of course, is intended to be in a bilateral framework. But the bilateral cooperation inexorably will help lay the foundation for greater cooperation and coordination at trilateral and quadrilateral levels among these four powers.

Australia, Japan and the United States already are engaged in institutionalized trilateral strategic dialogue, while India, Japan and the U.S. have held naval maneuvers since 2007, the last time being in April-May this year off the Okinawa coast. In addition, the quad members jointly staged major naval-war games in the Bay of Bengal in September 2007, roping in Singapore, too. Indeed, the coordination established among the Indian, Japanese, Australian and U.S. militaries in rescue operations following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami has helped promote closer cooperation among them on disaster relief.

Make no mistake: The U.S. has actively encouraged Indian defense cooperation with Australia and Japan, which are tied to the U.S. by security treaty — the ANZUS treaty in the case of Australia and a 1951 treaty with Japan that was revised in 1960.

Closer Indian defense ties with key Asia-Pacific members of America's hub-and-spoke global alliance system, in fact, are a natural corollary to the U.S.-India strategic tieup, which seeks to institute a "soft" alliance without treaty obligations, but with complex arrangements extending from the defense-framework accord and nuclear deal in mid-2005 to the recent End-Use Monitoring Agreement. As part of this tieup, India placed arms-purchase orders with the U.S. worth $3.5 billion just last year.

But while the U.S. has treaty commitments to defend Australia and Japan, its reciprocal security obligations to an emerging de facto ally like India are unclear. It also is doubtful whether security accords of the Japan-Australia, Australia-India and Japan-India type translate into tangible gains for the parties' national defense against visible threats, even though they do aid their diplomacy and are likely to contribute to Asian power stability.

Australia's own recent defense white paper, by unveiling the country's biggest military buildup since World War II, serves as a reminder that there is no substitute to building adequate national deterrent capabilities, even for a country under the U.S. security umbrella. Japan, for its part, is likely to move to a more independent security posture in the years ahead, even though a muscular Chinese approach has prompted Tokyo in this decade to strengthen its military alliance with the U.S.

More broadly, Rudd's government — through its record of being hyper-responsive to Chinese concerns, including on the Quadrilateral Initiative — has taken the lead for the U.S. in certain spheres. Just as Canberra has sought to balance its ties with Tokyo and Beijing, as well as with New Delhi and Beijing, the Obama administration now is following in those footsteps. Indeed, the new catchphrase coined by the Obama administration on China, "strategic reassurance," signals an American intent to be more accommodative of Chinese ambitions.

Or take another example: China's resurrection of its long-dormant claim to India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. Just as Australia has publicly chartered a course of neutrality on the Arunachal issue — to the delight of Beijing, which aims to leave an international question mark hanging over the legitimacy of India's control over that large Himalayan territory — U.S. policy is doing likewise, albeit quietly. Indeed, the Obama administration has signaled its intent to abandon elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill in Arunachal and any further Indo-U.S. naval maneuvers involving Japan or more parties like Australia.

In New Delhi, Rudd underscored both the promise and limitations of the new Australia-India strategic partnership. While lauding the new security agreement, he contended disingenuously that his continued refusal to sell India uranium was "not targeted at any individual country," although India is the only country affected by his policy. Worse still, he proffered a specious justification — India's nonmembership in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). That treaty has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil nuclear cooperation with a nonsignatory. Rather, it enjoins its parties to positively facilitate "the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy," so long as safeguards are in place.

Any restriction is not in the NPT but in the revised 1992 rules of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group that, paradoxically, were changed with Australian support last year to exempt India.

Eventually, Canberra will come round to selling India uranium. After all, how can Canberra continue to justify selling uranium to authoritarian China but banning such exports to democratic India, even though the latter has accepted what the former will not brook — stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of imported uranium to weapons use? Canberra will not be able to plow a lonely furrow on India indefinitely.
Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

Rahul M wrote:what does her not being from north India have to do with anything ?

munna wrote:

Rahul M wrote:what does her not being from north India have to do with anything ?

Ho Ho Ho! RahulMji tell the honourable gent in concern that "Nayyar" is a true blue blood Punjabi surname and the lady in question is indeed Punjabi and not to be confused with "Nair" from Southern India.

Rahul M wrote: nope nope ! read the article !

Science and technology are particularly promising areas for collaboration between Australia and India. Our scientific communities have complementary strengths and shared interests in a range of areas, including agriculture, biotechnology, renewable energy and information and communications technology.

Serious differences have emerged between India and Australia over the direction of talks at the climate summit in Copenhagen with Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh [ Images ] lashing out at Canberra, dubbing it as an "ayatollah" for its one-track approach.

"Australia is sort of the ayatollah of the single track," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh was quoted as saying by the 'Sydney Morning Herald'.

Developing countries are arguing that Australia and its allies are trying to push the outcome of talks away from the Kyoto Protocol, and Ramesh called it "a recipe for disaster".

RIO Tinto has agreed to sell its first iron ore to India, marking a strategic sales breakthrough in the Asian country.

"There will be a shipment arriving there (India) in December, so one is due to leave shortly," Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Sam Walsh said.

The cargo, from Rio's Pilbara operations in Western Australia, is destined for Essar Steel, a large Indian steel maker, Mr Walsh said.

India, which boasts a growing domestic steel market, is normally an iron ore exporter, mainly to the Chinese spot market.

durgesh wrote:Indian youth stabbed in Australia, succumbs to injuries

Attacks on students not racism: Oz report

harbans wrote:Sriman ji went through the article in the Aussie paper. It's a bit ironical of an Indian calling Aussies..'white dogs' while at the same time accusing them of racism.

Akshut wrote:^^ And that would really hurt the Aussies?

Stan_Savljevic wrote:Australia Rejects One-Third of Indian Students Over Fake Documents - Jan 05, 2010
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Australia ... _medium=en

Australia refused to grant visas to one-third of the Indian students who applied to its universities from July to October 2009

because they submitted fake documents, The Economic Times reported. The proportion is a substantial increase from the 6.5 percent of such rejections in the corresponding months of 2008, the newpaper said.

“We had projected a fall of nearly 20 per cent in the number of Indian students studying in Australia in 2010. With the latest incident, it could even go up to 50 per cent,” says Gautam Gupta, president of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (Fisa).

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Judging from visa applications, there would be 4,000 fewer Indian arrivals in 2010 — a drop of 21 per cent despite a projected growth of 4.3 per cent in international tourism numbers, according to recent estimates from Australia’s Tourism Forecasting Committee (TFC). More than 70,000 Indians studied in Australia in 2009.