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Last week in the Sydney suburb of Harris Park, four Sikh men were reportedly attacked in their car by a group of men carrying bats and hammers. Speaking to police after the attack, the men identified their alleged attackers as fellow Indian Australians. The working assumption of the police is that the Sikh men were targeted because of the ongoing farmers’ protests in India, where the majority of protesters are Sikhs from the states of Punjab and Haryana. The alleged attackers are believed to be men who strongly identify with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The alleged attack follows an incident in mid-February when the New South Wales police stopped a convoy of cars, draped with Indian flags, that was attempting to drive by a Gurdwara (a Sikh temple) in the Sydney suburb of Glenwood in an apparent act of intimidation. If the working assumptions of these two incidents proves correct, it would be a clear demonstration of how the BJP’s identity polit