Oz miffed with Indian media for hyping attacks

Melbourne, Feb 3: Australia has yet again blamed the Indian media for exaggerating the threat to Indian students down under and for hyping up the assaults against the community.

In the wake of the Australian police's allegations that an Indian faked an incident of racial attack, Victorian Premier John Brumby accused the Indian media and 'some officials' of hyping up the assaults by indulging in 'unbalanced reporting'.

“I think I"ll make a couple of comments and in a sense they go, as much as anything, to the way the Indian media and the, to a lesser extent some representatives in the Indian government, portray these events," he said on Wednesday, Feb 3.

The police said that Melbourne-based Jaspreet Singh pretended to have been subjected to racial abuse on Jan 8 and set himself on fire on Jan 8 to claim insurance money.

"And we"ve had this [Jaspreet Singh] case, which attracted a lot of attention in India, and police have charged an individual with setting fire to himself. So I hope that there is some balance to the debate, some balance to the reporting in India and certainly to date that balance hasn"t been there," he said.

Speaking on the murder of Ranjodh Singh, whose half-burnt body was found on a roadside in Dec 2009, Brumby stressed that the people who have been charged with that murder are both Indians.

In Jun 2009, when a slew of alleged racist attacks surfaced first, Oz envoy John McCarthy blamed the Indian media of damaging the image of Australia.

"India's voracious 24-hour cable news channels helped stoke the wave of fear and outrage among Indians in both countries," McCarthy had said.

OneIndia News