Australia should send Hindi-speaking diplomats to India: Expert

MELBOURNE: Australia should send Hindi speaking diplomats to India, in a bid to take relations with New Delhi to the next level, a renowned international affairs expert has said.

Australian National University's Ian Hall, who is an international affairs expert with an interest in Indian foreign policy, said that even though much of the government business in India was conducted in English, but sending a top diplomat fluent in a local language was "a sign of respect", The Australian reported.

"We do this with the Chinese and the Indonesians -- and we make a bit fuss about the respect stuff -- so why not with India?," Hall said.

However, the secretary of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Dennis Richardson, refuted the idea and said there was no need to speak Hindi.

Richardson, who was questioned during Senate estimates last month about languages in which the department was weaker than it should be, said: "It has not been our experience that a head of mission in New Delhi requires (Hindi)."

However, he did acknowledge that the diplomats in Indonesia and China were fluent in the respective local languages.

Richardson said that a 2010 review had identified Arabic, Farsi (spoken in Iran), Korean, Thai and Turkish as languages in which there were "strategic gaps".

He said that there had been "outstanding" ambassadors in Jakarta, Beijing and Tokyo who had not spoken the local language.

He added that in deciding postings in general having the language is an important component of it, but it is not the sole component.

"You can be a brilliant linguist but you might have appalling judgement. We will go with the judgement," he said.

Australia's Asian languages policy for education embraces four "priority" languages - Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and Indonesian, but not Hindi.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in her speech last year announcing Ken Henry's Asian Century white paper, said India was "an English-speaking democracy".

However, the comment led to a rejoinder from Asian studies expert Kent Anderson, that perhaps just four per cent of the population in India was fluent in English.