Beyond Cricket: Australia–India Evolving Relations

Abstract

Australia's relationship with India stands in apparent contrast with its relations elsewhere in Asia. Most accounts of Australia's links to India liken them to recurrent bouts of amnesia, arguing that Australia has not put the same efforts into engaging with India that it has into fostering ties with Japan, China and Indonesia and that, like a patient with injury to the hippocampus who has lost the ability to lay down long-term memories, Australia appears to approach each episodic moment of contact without recollection of the past. Australia's relationship with India has passed through distinct phases, from a brief moment of warmth in the years immediately after India achieved independence, through frosty decades of the Cold War. In contrast to many other accounts, the paper argues that since the 1980s Australia has sought with considerable consistency to engage with India and that the tenuousness of the relationship is primarily due to Indian indifference. Recent bilateral issues, including the supply of uranium to India and attacks on Indian students, have led to an enlargement of contacts which may signify that the engagement is at last becoming a mutual one.

Notes

¹Australia rejected the right of veto by members of the United Nations Security Council, whereas India left this decision to the Big Five UNSC members. On Japan, Australia took a tough stance at the International Military Tribunal like other victorious Allies, whereas India presented the sole dissenting voice. India did not sign the San Francisco Peace Treaty and rejected both the stationing of US troops in Japan and the continued Allied occupation of Okinawa (Watt 1968, 222–3).

²When initial funding expired in 1995, the Centre moved to Curtin University to become the Indian Ocean Centre.

³Some visits from both sides related to participation in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings (CHOGM).

⁴There is now a Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Kerala.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Mayer

Peter Mayer is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide. He received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has written on many aspects of Indian politics and economics. His recent work has examined a diverse range of issues including: why the proportion of women in the Indian population has been steadily declining since 1901 - and whether this predisposes north India to violence; the role played by civic engagement and social capital in the human development performance of the Indian states; the introduction of e-governance in the Indian states; India's engagement with economic reforms and a major study of the sociology of suicide in India. Purnendra Jain is a professor in the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide. His research interests include Japan's domestic and foreign policy, East Asian regionalism and Australia–Asia relations.