Andrew Charlton’s ‘Australia’s Pivot to India’ is a broad sweep of India-Australia ties

SERVING Members of Parliament normally don’t write a book that is not completely hagiographic or meant to apple-polish the target government to further their business interests. But Andrew Charlton is not only a Rhodes Scholar, he is the MP from Parramatta, which has the highest concentration of Indians in Australia. Charlton is also not a newbie convert to India. He first visited the country two decades back.

Divided into 22 chapters, his book is a broad sweep of every developing facet in Indo-Australian ties and is studded with vignettes that avoid the tone from becoming didactic. Multiculturalism has flourished and no longer does a Harvinder Sandhu have to anglicise his name to Harry Sands.

Charlton delves into unexplored corners, like why despite a joint colonial history, there was no diplomatic commonality between India and Australia. Or, how and why India’s military expansion in the 1980s and ’90s was not conducive to bilateral ties. Charlton has his own answers, but the true one is that Australia, like Japan, follows in the wake of the US. — TNS