The Australian government takes seriously a Hindu political party's threat to stop Australian cricketers playing in India in retaliation for a series of violent attacks on Indian students in Australia, the foreign minister said Thursday. The vague threat from the Shiv Sena party further escalates tensions between the two cricket-loving nations over highly publicized attacks against Indian nationals in Australia that the Indian media blames on racism. Australian authorities deny a racist motive behind most of the street crimes. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said officials from his department met with Cricket Australia, the sport's national organizing body, Thursday to discuss the threat. “We take any threat to Australian sportsmen and sportswomen traveling overseas, or playing overseas, very seriously,” Smith told reporters. Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray said activists would target lucrative Indian Premier League games involving Australian cricketers in Mumbai. He did not say how the games would be targeted. Thackeray said the party would not let “kangaroo cricketers” play in its home state of Maharashtra where two major cities, Mumbai and Nagpur, hold Indian Premier League (IPL) games. Shiv Sena will “not allow Australian cricketers to step on Mumbai's soil,” the party newspaper Saamna quoted Thackeray as saying. “Indian students are being beaten up, shot dead and burnt alive,” Thackeray said, adding that displays of sportsmanship between Indian and Australian cricketers were “shameful.” Smith said Shiv Sena had a history of disrupting cricket matches and of making “colorful remarks.” But the government would not decide whether Australian cricketers ran the risk of playing in India. “It is, in the end, a matter for Cricket Australia, and for Australian cricketers, to determine whether they travel and play overseas,” Smith said. India has asked Australia to take immediate steps to curb violence against its citizens there, warning that recent attacks could affect relations between the two countries. Meanwhile, India's leading opposition party wants a ban on beef at the Commonwealth Games later this year to strengthen the country's “cultural values and age-old traditions”. Rajnath Singh, a former president and senior member of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has written to Games organizers to keep beef off the menu, local media said. “Cow is considered sacred in India,” Singh wrote to Suresh Kalmadi, who heads the organizing committee for the Oct. 3-14 Games in New Delhi, DNA newspaper reported.
