Indian diaspora struggles to find a voice in politics
Survey reveals underrepresentation of migrant group in leadership roles
In 2019, when Deepak Joshi visited New Delhi, protests had just started against the new citizenship law that critics said discriminated against India’s Muslims.
After he returned home to Melbourne, Australia, Joshi was drawn into Indian diaspora groups, who called for the law to be repealed, and later became involved in other migrant and refugee associations.
In 2020, the 64-year-old co-founded an advocacy group that worked with political leaders to resolve issues related to migrant rights, racism, multiculturalism, and religious extremism. Two years later, he contested the Warrandyte seat in the Victoria state election on a Greens party ticket, finishing third.
“I am deeply involved in issues that are relevant not only for the diaspora but also for non-Indian migrant communities,” Joshi, who has been living in Australia since 1997, told the Post.
Despite individual efforts such as Joshi’s to bridge communities and advocate for immigrants’ rights, a recent Victoria State survey revealed significant underrepresentation of the Indian diaspora in Australian politics and leadership roles.
This gap, underscored by the survey’s findings that most of the state’s residents are unaware of Indian leaders in these spheres, points to systemic challenges and a pressing need for more inclusive representation in a country where Indians form the second-largest migrant group.
The survey results, published last month, showed that 81 per cent of 2,532 Victorian respondents were not aware of the Indian diaspora in leadership roles in politics or business, and more than 80 per cent did not know or did not believe there was sufficient representation of IndianAustralians in leadership roles.
Surjeet Dogra Dhanji, a postdoctoral fellow studying the Indian diaspora and migration at Melbourne University, said while many Australians of Indian origin were highly educated, earned “relatively high incomes”, spoke fluent English and had a “good understanding of democratic political processes”, very few had made inroads into the Australian legislative institutions.
“It’s not the case with other countries including the US, UK and Canada, where the Indian diaspora is also large,” said Dhanji, the lead author of the report.
In many cases, individuals acquired party membership just before seeking nomination without in-depth knowledge of how to navigate the internal party mechanisms, party gatekeeping and factional competition, Dhanji said.
She said potential candidates sometimes also lacked strong social and professional networks and financial resources to articulate a convincing policy agenda.
Leadership within the Indian diaspora had become more visible at community level, especially in terms of social and philanthropic work during the Covid-19 pandemic, but not at the political, CEO or board levels, Dhanji said.
Sukhmani Khorana, Scientia associate professor in the University of New South Wales’ faculty of arts, said there was an “unconscious bias” in every sphere of society that prevented people of Indian origin to rise to leadership roles.
Since Australia had always viewed India as a trade partner, Khorana said Indians were often not viewed from a “human” perspective or treated as “equals”.
Census data from June 2022 showed that Indian-born residents made up about 2.9 per cent – or 753,520 people – of Australia’s 23.4 million population. About 40 per cent of Indian migrants in Australia are settled in Victoria.
But in terms of politics, 96 per cent of the country’s federal lawmakers are white, with very little representation from people of colour, let alone those of Indian origin.
Only three of the 76 senators and one of the 151 members of the House of Representatives in the current Australian federal parliament are of Indian descent.
Indian-born electronics engineer Manoj Kumar, 57, who migrated to Australia in 2005, twice ran for office on a Labor Party ticket.
He came up against former defence minister Kevin Andrews in the 2013 federal election, and faced twice-elected Liberal candidate Neil Angus in Victoria’s 2018 state polls. Both times, Kumar was defeated.
Kumar said it felt as though there was a glass ceiling for people of colour in major political parties, which offered few opportunities for members of ethnic minority groups to be nominated to winnable seats.
In 2022, the Greens ran more candidates of colour from indigenous communities and women than both Liberals and Labor combined.
Kumar said he was networking with various multicultural groups to collectively press for people of colour to comprise at least 20 per cent of all political parties’ nominees in winnable seats.
According to Kumar, parties consciously field a non-white South Asian candidate in non-winnable seats to be “morally satisfied” at having given a chance to a non-white person “in the name of multiculturalism”.
Still, some politicians of Indian origin refuse to give up. Shwetali Sawant, who finished 10th from Point Cook in Victoria state elections two years ago, said she was still striving to “empower” women in business.