Victorian police chief Simon Overland on Wednesday cautioned against attaching racial overtones to all attacks on Indian students in Australia, saying there was a 'hysterical edge' to such reactions.
Denying that the latest attack on a 21-year- old Indian student in Melbourne on Tuesday was racially-motivated, Overland also defended the conduct of police in preventing such incidents.
In the ninth such attack on Indians in the last one-month, Nardeep Singh, a nursing student at Chisholm Institute in Dandenong in Melbourne's east, was slashed with box-cutter knife by one of the five men who confronted him in a car park on Tuesday.
Singh was attacked by five men when he was leaving his college in an apparent robbery attempt, police said.
Police chief commissioner in Victoria, Overland said the latest attack did not appear to be race-related and denied allegations that police was not doing enough to tackle race-based attacks.
"There is a hysterical edge to this, and assertions that we have not done enough on this issue and not taking it seriously is just plain wrong.
"We have done an enormous amount on this issue on the past 18 months both pro-actively and reactively," he was quoted by a media report in Melbourne.