Indian migrant Gagan Grover works with Deakin University in Melbourne as the General manager of marketing operations.
A few weeks ago, he received an email from an unknown email address asking him why he wasn’t recruiting more Indians.
“The sender said you should recruit more Indians and promote multiculturalism in Australia. I felt it was a strange email. Not thinking too much about it, I ignored it,” Mr Grover told SBS Punjabi.
A few days later, he received another email from the same sender. Mr Grover says he was surprised at the contents of the email.
“The sender said ‘you should be mindful of the caste system while recruiting. You should only recruit Brahmins [an upper caste] in the workplace and not others’.
‘I was very surprised that someone was sending these emails to me in Australia and wondered what the sender’s agenda was,” said Mr Grover.
He immediately deleted the emails and marked the sender as a spam.
Mr Grover is the only Indian in Deakin’s marketing department. He says the emails particularly targeted Indians in recruitment roles. Since he is the only Indian in the department, no others at his workplace received the emails.
Another Indian migrant, Mandy Bose who is an IT recruiter in Melbourne says she also received similar emails that threatened her of "dire consequences" if she fails to respect the Indian values and culture in Australia.
Ms Bose says she was also warned against eating beef.
IT recruiter Mandy Bose Source: Supplied
"I got three different emails, and basically one email was mentioning about not eating beef at the workplace and [said there has] got to be more understanding of Indians' nature, belief and culture and respecting that," Mandy told SBS Malayalam.
Like Mr Grover, she was also asked not to recruit non-Brahmins, claiming Indians were "highly intellectual and skilful compared to other communities".
"I don’t want to recruit any lower caste people that really is an insult to me. So never recruit any Indians other than Brahmanas (sic)," one of the emails reads.
A screenshot of one of the emails Mandy Bose received. Source: Supplied
Mr Grover says whoever sent the email was clearly not aware of the Australian work culture and ethics.
“It’s a multicultural society that has no place for such parochial and divisive thinking and practices at workplaces or anywhere. It should be clear to whoever wrote the emails that it’s illegal to discriminate against anyone on the basis of their heritage, colour of the skin or ethnicity.”
