iscover
Melbourne cheered a foreign political rally and called it diplomacy. If Beijing or even Washington had run the same playbook, we’d have called it foreign interference, so why the free pass for New Delhi?
One can only hope that following the events of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Melbourne that there is a useful thought experiment doing the rounds of Canberra’s strategic community, and it is worth asking in full: imagine Xi Jinping filling Marvel Stadium with 30,000 flag-waving supporters at an event organised by a man who once presided over a body explicitly established to sell the Chinese Communist Party’s image to the West, with Australia’s prime minister and the Victorian state premier applauding from the stage.
Nobody would call that a community festival. Nobody would call it cultural diplomacy. Every China desk officer in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, every analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, every backbencher who has spent the last five years warning about United Front influence operations would call it exactly what it is: a political rally for a foreign power, conducted on Australian soil, with the imprimatur of our elected leaders.
So why, when Narendra Modi did precisely that at “Melbourne Meets Modi” this month, did the response range from indulgent to enthusiastic?
Why did Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan lend the event the full authority of their offices, rather than the wary distance we now instinctively apply to anything with a whiff of Beijing about it?
These are not rhetorical questions. They go to the heart of whether Australia has actually learned anything from a decade of hard lessons about foreign influence, economic coercion, strategic dependency and as questions about social cohesion loom, the influence of diaspora communities, or whether we have simply swapped one patron for another and called it diversification.
Cynics have attempted to frame it as pure sectarian political manoeuvring by Prime Minister Albanese and embattled Victorian Premier Allan, seeking to sure up votes in the rapidly growing and increasingly influential Indian diaspora communities across both Victoria’s battleground electorates and those across the nation.
Others have sought to paint it as emblematic of the nation’s rich, multicultural tapestry largely defined by shallow, idealistic views of contemporary multiculturalism in Australia, that inescapably always comes back to some variation of the following argument: “imagine how bland our food would be without the migrants” regardless the broader challenges facing the nation.
Yet Australia continues undeterred, once again pursuing the path of least resistance in the pursuit of headline economic growth, while all other concerns are secondary, or so a growing portion of the Australian public are beginning to feel.
More than meets the eye
“Melbourne Meets Modi” was framed as a celebration of the Indian–Australian community. It was not that. It was built around a single political brand, and its lead organiser, the Australia India Foundation’s Jay Shah, had served as president of the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party (OFBJP) in Australia.
By its own account, OFBJP exists to project a “positive and correct image” of India and the BJP to the Western world and to push back against the “distortions” spread by the party’s critics. That is not community outreach. That is an image-management operation, and Australia was the target audience.
The curation of the evening reinforced the point. Seventeen performing groups, 333 performers, framed as a showcase of India’s diversity Hindu devotional acts, Sikh performances, Christian representation, and, on the published bill, not one obviously Muslim act, for a faith practised by roughly 200 million Indians.
Perhaps a Muslim performer stood somewhere in the ensemble; the organisers haven’t published a full roster to check. But the absence, deliberate or not, tracks a pattern that recurs everywhere the BJP’s diaspora machinery operates: a version of “Indian” identity that quietly narrows to mean Hindu, nationalist and loyal to the party line.
Sounds oddly familiar, right?
And it matters whose brand this was. Modi was chief minister of Gujarat during the 2002 riots that killed more than a thousand people, most of them Muslim, at the hands of Hindu mobs. India’s courts ultimately cleared him of complicity, but the stain was serious enough that Washington denied him a US visa for the best part of a decade.
Since then, his government has presided over the demolition of mosques, the construction of a temple on the site of one razed by a mob, and a citizenship law that pointedly carves Muslims out of its fast-track provisions. This is the leader Melbourne turned into a 30,000-strong flag-waving spectacle, with two of the country’s most senior elected officials on the podium.
A leaf from a tried-and-true playbook – just ask London and Ottawa
It is important for people to understand that what is unfolding in Australia is not novel. It is the same model the BJP has run for a decade in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, and the pattern is well documented.
The UK chapter of OFBJP, founded in 1992, has, for years, run explicit electoral campaigns against politicians it judges insufficiently “pro-India” including, notably, British MPs of Indian and Sikh heritage tagged as sympathetic to Khalistan.
During the UK’s 2019 election, OFBJP’s British president mobilised Hindu voters through WhatsApp networks and temple contacts to swing seats towards the Conservatives; leaked messages accessed by British journalists accusing the Labour Party of being “anti-India” and “anti-Hindu”.
By the 2024 UK election, a coalition calling itself Hindus for Democracy was demanding candidates publicly endorse a sectarian manifesto, in electorates where the diaspora vote share runs as high as a third of the local population. Academics who track the phenomenon describe cultural festivals across Europe becoming steadily more politicised, with OFBJP chapter heads taking the stage to deliver party messaging in Hindi to audiences that came for a concert.
Then there’s Canada, the case Australians should study most closely, because it shows what happens when diaspora tension curdles into something far more serious than an awkward stadium rally.
Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead outside a Surrey gurdwara in 2023, and then-prime minister Justin Trudeau publicly alleged Indian government involvement, plunging Ottawa and New Delhi into a diplomatic crisis that saw expelled diplomats and stalled trade talks.
The picture has since become murkier rather than clearer: Canadian police now say their investigation has found no direct evidence tying Indian government officials to the killing, even as the United States has separately indicted an imprisoned Indian gang boss, Lawrence Bishnoi, for allegedly directing the assassination from his cell using smuggled phones, as part of a much wider transnational crime crackdown.
Relations between Ottawa and New Delhi are thawing under Mark Carney. But Sikh-Canadian groups remain furious that the thaw looks like Ottawa quietly dropping the question of accountability and the underlying reality doesn’t change: India’s domestic sectarian politics do not stay inside India’s borders and diaspora communities that resist New Delhi’s preferred narrative can pay a price for it, whatever the precise chain of command turns out to be.
Different architecture, same instinct
None of this is to claim India’s approach is a carbon copy of China’s.
It isn’t, and the distinction matters. Beijing’s United Front Work Department is a Leninist state instrument, run through the Communist Party’s Central Committee, tasked with co-opting diaspora business figures, students and professional bodies, and, per the researchers who study, it deployed against Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers and anyone else the party deems a threat to its legitimacy narrative. OFBJP is a party-affiliated diaspora organisation, not a directorate of the Indian state, and India’s institutions retain a pluralism and contestability that China’s do not.
But strip away the architecture and the instinct looks remarkably similar: identify a diaspora community, mobilise it around the ruling party’s brand rather than the country’s, use it to shape host-nation politics and silence unfavourable narratives, and treat cultural events as force-multipliers for the message.
Modi has made the comparison easy for us. Addressing expatriates in Trinidad last year, he told them: “Each one of you is a Rashtradoot – an ambassador of India’s values.”
Thirty thousand ambassadors filling a Melbourne stadium, cheering a serving foreign head of government’s domestic political brand, is not so distant from the “consultative conference” model Beijing runs with its own diaspora carefully selected representatives, screened for reliability, deployed to carry the party’s preferred story back into the host society.
We built an entire foreign interference law, a Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, and years of parliamentary scrutiny around exactly this mechanism when the flag was red. It’s worth asking honestly why the scrutiny evaporates when the flag is saffron.
A Faustian bargain? Again!?
Australia’s China experience should have taught one lesson above all others: economic overreliance on a single benefactor with a track record of leveraging that dependency is a strategic liability, not a strategic asset.
Coal, wine, barley, lobster, cotton, the 2020–22 coercion campaign was a masterclass in how quickly market access becomes a lever. And yet the language now deployed around India, “world’s fastest-growing large economy”, “de-risking from China”, “diversification” has the unmistakable rhythm of a country about to make the same mistake with a different partner.
The reality on trade is more mixed than either boosters or critics tend to admit, and it’s worth being precise about it.
The Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement, in force since December 2022, has delivered real tariff reductions and more than 85 per cent of Australian goods exports by value are now duty free, rising towards 90 per cent, and bilateral merchandise trade has grown to roughly US$24 billion ($34.96 billion).
Some of the reported decline in Australian exports to India is an artefact of an abnormal 2022 coal spike driven by an Indian heatwave, not a structural collapse.
But the Lowy Institute’s own assessment is that the deal remains “half-finished” – no services liberalisation, no investment protection, no labour mobility framework and India’s broader posture towards trade remains instinctively protectionist, shaped by a domestic political economy that treats market access as something to be rationed, not opened. India walked away from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2019 rather than accept the terms; it drives hard, defensive bargains everywhere, and Australia is no exception.
Layer onto that India’s explicit external economic strategy, which runs through labour mobility and remittances rather than goods trade, and the diaspora stops looking like an incidental community and starts looking like a deliberate instrument of statecraft an asset in itself, not merely a source of donations or votes.
If pleasing New Delhi is genuinely the strategic goal, the price of admission is more migrant labour access, on India’s terms.
And then there’s the money that moved on exactly the right morning. AustralianSuper chose the day of Modi’s visit to announce a further $500 million commitment to India’s state-backed National Investment and Infrastructure Fund.
It may well be a sound investment on the merits. But when the country’s largest superannuation fund times a half-billion-dollar allocation to a state vehicle for maximum diplomatic optics, fund members are entitled to ask a blunt question: whose interests did that timing serve? Theirs or the government’s photo opportunity?
The electoral calculus
Strip away the strategic language and there’s a simpler explanation sitting underneath all of this: Indian–Australians are now the largest overseas-born community in the country, heavily concentrated in the outer-suburban marginal seats that decide federal elections.
A prime minister sharing a stage with the most popular politician in that community’s country of origin isn’t purely diplomacy. It’s also, unmistakably and inescapably domestic campaigning and it sits awkwardly alongside a government that otherwise talks constantly about protecting social cohesion from imported sectarianism, then hosts the party for the subcontinent’s most polarising leader.
Asking the question doesn’t answer it
None of this means Australia should treat India as an adversary or pretend the strategic case for the relationship is empty. India is a Quad partner, a potential and still highly unlikely hedge against an overly China-centric region, a market of genuine long-term scale and a democracy, however imperfect and however majoritarian its current governing party’s instincts in a way China simply is not.
Deepening the relationship is not, in itself, the mistake. The mistake is doing so with the same wide-eyed credulity that got Australia burned the first time: assuming good faith rather than testing it, treating diaspora mobilisation as benign because it comes wrapped in saris and bhangra rather than red banners, and assuming a country of 1.4 billion people is somehow too chaotic or too grateful to play the same influence games everyone else plays.
All because we’re too scared to have an open and honest conversation, one that no matter the accusations, we are clear-eyed and without reservations.
That is, at the bottom, a soft bigotry dressed up as strategic maturity, and New Delhi has shown in London, in Ottawa and now in Melbourne that it will exploit exactly that assumption with more discipline than we credit it for.
Had Thursday’s rally been organised around Xi Jinping, we would have named it instantly for what it was. Because it was organised around Modi, Australia’s political leadership put its arms around it instead.
That double standard is worth interrogating honestly, before Canberra finds itself as dependent on New Delhi’s goodwill as it once was on Beijing’s, and just as surprised when that goodwill turns out to have conditions attached.
After all, just because they’re the enemy of our enemy, doesn’t make them a friend.
Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below or get in touch at
Stephen Kuper
Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.
Want to see more stories from trusted news sources?
Make Defence Connect a preferred news source on Google.
Click here to add Defence Connect as a preferred news source.