What the Indians really think of Australia

A few weeks after Abbott's swing through India, I bumped into an Australian intelligence official who was in Delhi to get the inside word on how things were going. He wouldn't have had to knock on too many doors. India treats Australia with such irreverence that the person responsible for Australia at the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi has 25 other countries on his desk.

So what do the Indians really think of Australia then? I asked him, at the end of his weeklong stay.

"Like old Uncle Bob, drunk again and sitting in the corner with no one to talk to and nobody knows what to do with him." It's time Australian officials left the cricket bats in the dressing room and talked seriously about what Australia can do for India.

 

Narendra Modi is about to become the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Australia in 28 years. That, and the fact that Tony Abbott was the first foreign leader to be granted an official bilateral meeting on Indian soil with the newly elected Modi, has generated some buzz about the relationship between the two countries.

In addition to attending the G20 conference in Brisbane, Modi will address the Australian parliament, and, to the delight of Australia's Indian community, appear at a mass rally at Sydney's Allphones Arena.

The Australian government is also hosting a 1000-plate banquet for Modi at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where he will no doubt receive a solemn tour of the famous stadium's inner sanctum. Indians love cricket, as everyone knows, so what better place to organise a state dinner for an Indian Prime Minister than the hallowed halls of the MCG?

It's certainly true that Indians love cricket. What they hate is the way Australia plays the game. Whenever an Australian official gets up before an Indian audience and emphasises the mighty cricket bond our nations share, the Indians smile and nod their heads.

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Inwardly, though, the cricket talk serves to remind them of the countless tales of ugly sledging by Australian players who make a show of rubbing Indians' noses in the dirt. As for Modi himself, he couldn't care less about cricket.

Instead, he is interested in is business, and what he would love to hear is how much extra money Australian companies are planning to invest in India next year.

After recent meetings with the Chinese, American and Japanese leaders, Modi received investment pledges worth over $100 billion. Unfortunately, Modi won't hear anything like that in Australia. When Julia Gillard came to India as Prime Minister in 2012, she set a goal of $40 billion in two-way trade by 2015. How is that going?

Trade between Australia and India has plummeted, last year falling below $15 billion. This year it's likely to be even less. Australian companies actively dislike India. No sooner have firms such as   the ANZ, Woolworths, AMP and Leightons set up in India, than they are packing up and heading back to Australia. It's too hot, too polluted and way too much hassle.

It's not as if the Indians haven't noticed. Before Tony Abbott addressed an Indian Chamber of Commerce lunch in New Delhi in September, India's Trade Minister Nirmala Sitharaman lectured him about corporate Australia's lack of interest in India.

Abbott appeared to get the message - briefly - sternly telling the Australian business leaders present to lift their game. "More investment please," Abbott told them. "That is the message that is coming."  He then added: "The less said about Australian investment in India the better."

Actually, the more said the better. India is a country desperate for foreign investment and foreign know-how, the kind which many Australian companies are well placed to offer.  Australia can sell more to India than just coal, copper, and gold.

Not that you would know that watching Tony Abbott. He was only in the country for two days and he spent half of one of those days in Mumbai hugging Sachin Tendulkar and droning on about Sir Donald Bradman.  He spent the rest of his time reminding the Indians how backward their country was when he passed through it  the first time on his way to Oxford.

"I can remember on my first day in Mumbai watching a bullock cart take material into a nuclear power station," Abbott told one business audience. If he wasn't reminiscing about his backpacking days, he was talking about another relic from the past, coal. Queensland coal, mainly,  because Abbott fervently hopes two Indian companies will borrow $16 billion to develop Australia's biggest coal mine.

As Macquarie Bank's head of research in India, Rakesh Arora, told me recently, the two companies in question are so stretched financially that "none on the street are assuming that these projects will make any progress."

A few weeks after Abbott's swing through India, I bumped into an Australian intelligence official who was in Delhi to get the inside word on how things were going. He wouldn't have had to knock on too many doors. India treats Australia with such irreverence that the person responsible for Australia at the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi has 25 other countries on his desk.

So what do the Indians really think of Australia then? I asked him, at the end of his weeklong stay.

"Like old Uncle Bob, drunk again and sitting in the corner with no one to talk to and nobody knows what to do with him." It's time Australian officials left the cricket bats in the dressing room and talked seriously about what Australia can do for India.

Jason Koutsoukis is Fairfax Media's South Asia Correspondent