For years the media has told us that, while the Xi Jinping regime in China and Vladimir Putin’s monstrous government in Russia were our biggest threats, the “world’s biggest democracy” of India was our great ally and key partner against China.
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Australia in 2023, The Australian fawned over him. “Mr Modi’s visit to Sydney … was a powerful tour de force that sent a message Beijing would be foolish to ignore,” it simpered in an editorial. “It has put the world’s most populous nation, with its huge army and vast potential, firmly where it belongs — at the heart of the defence of democracy and freedom in our region.”
Nine newspapers were equally ecstatic. “Together, India and Australia potentially can help balance and constrain China when it acts against international democratic norms,” editorialised The Sydney Morning Herald. The paper’s resident China critic Peter Hartcher has repeatedly been moved to raptures by Modi. “In a touch of Bollywood, Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week invited Anthony Albanese to step into a colourful mechanised ‘chariot’ to circle the Ahmedabad cricket field with him. Together, they received the adulation of the crowd before the opening day of the fourth Test,” Hartcher wrote when the prime minister visited India. “An economic miracle is shifting the global balance of power,” he wrote in August.
Modi’s and his party’s overt fascism, Islamophobia, ethnic cleansing and systemic human rights violations have always formed a dark undercurrent to this enthusiastic Australian embrace of the country as a strategic partner against the Chinese dictatorship, and tend to be mentioned only as footnotes to the praise for Modi.
India’s role in the assassination in Canada of a Sikh separatist last year, and confirmation of a separate Indian plot to murder another activist in the United States, were more inconvenient facts that received relatively little coverage in Australia, in contrast to the routine outraged reporting of Chinese attempts to influence and intimidate — if not murder — Chinese citizens in Australia and Chinese Australians.
The recent de facto expulsion in India of ABC journalist Avani Dias also received decidedly minimal coverage in outlets like the Nine newspapers — especially when you recall the furore over Australian journalists being denied entry into China.
Yesterday we found out that an entire “nest” of Indian spies was kicked out of Australia. The Washington Post reported that two spies (presumably enough for the term “nest”, though perhaps not for a “hive”) for India’s “Research and Analysis Wing” were expelled by Australia in 2020. ASIO director Mike Burgess referred to the expulsion in his annual threat assessment in 2021, pointedly refusing to identify the country other than to say it wasn’t one in our region.
The ABC’s Andrew Greene — the country’s best and most sceptical defence journalist — had specifically pushed Burgess on whether it was India last November, without result, but it seems some official was happy to brief a US newspaper about it. He also noted that Singapore, South Korea and Israel had been identified along with India as countries with spies active in Australia. Armed with his own information, Greene broke the story locally yesterday. Nine and The Australian took some hours to rewrite the Washington Post yarn, without mentioning the ABC story, but you’ll have to look long and hard on their sites to find the resulting stories.
When Burgess originally referred to the expulsion, and ruled out China as the offending country, the media and national security establishment assured everyone it was the Putin regime. It was likely to be Russia, according to The Australian. “There is a very high degree of certainty Mike Burgess is talking about Russia in this case,” Peter Jennings of the defence department and defence contractor-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute declared. “Almost certainly” Russia, terror expert Greg Barton said.
Russia was behind spies expelled from Australia early last year, but India figured in no-one’s calculations back in 2021.
This is the problem with journalists and editors covering national security who rely heavily on the national security establishment, including hangers-on, thinktankers and various experts who make a good living as rent-a-quotes on security matters. When coverage is dictated by narratives such as the China obsession that dominates Nine newspapers’ view of the world, the real story goes missing.
Note what The Washington Post reported Indian spies as doing here: “monitoring ‘their country’s diaspora community’, trying to penetrate local police departments and stealing information about sensitive security systems at Australian airports”. Exactly the kind of thing Chinese spies are routinely accused of doing. No wonder India’s media cheerleaders are downplaying it all.
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