Brijal Parikh was driving to coach his local cricket team last Saturday when a stranger leaned out and hurled a line that has become a tired weapon in this tense political season. “Go back to your country, you Indian c**t.” The words were crude, but what struck him more was how casually they were delivered. As he recounted in a post shared earlier this week, he stopped and confronted the man, telling him plainly that he was “the son of a migrant” and that Parikh himself was “a proud Australian and proud of my Indian heritage”. The man had nothing to say in return.
Parikh, a former adviser to Victorian Liberal MP Brad Battin, has spent years working across local politics and community sport, and is not someone unfamiliar with heated exchanges. Yet the encounter in Clyde North cut through the noise of the broader political storm with its simplicity. “To anyone who tells people like me to ‘go back to your country’, let me be clear and loud,” he wrote. “Australia is my country. I am a proud Australian, and in this great nation, let me remind over years we are all migrants in the end except for the First Nations.”
His account arrives at a moment when national politics is unusually combustible. Anti-immigration marches have grown louder. Pauline Hanson has gained a new political mileage with Barnaby Joyce’s defection. Polls show rising anxiety about housing. Anger has become a political resource, and the lines drawn online are increasingly spilling into everyday interactions. Parikh’s experience is one small example of how the rhetoric sits on the surface of daily life, never far from an eruption.
He describes responding “respectfully”, though he admits the word was laced with sarcasm. He reminded the man hurling abuse that his own family, like most Australians, arrived from somewhere else. “When he goes back to wherever his family or his ancestors came from, I’ll go back too.” The retort was sharp, but anchored in a basic truth. Migration is the common story of the country, regardless of the tone of today’s arguments.
Community leaders, already bracing for another round of protests next month, say these everyday moments are becoming more frequent. They reflect a tension far larger than one incident outside a sports ground. Yet they also show something else: that those targeted are not retreating. Parikh’s response, shared among friends and supporters, is deliberately public. He wants the broader community to hear it.
Racism’s sting lies not only in the insult but in the attempt to unsettle someone’s belonging. Parikh refused to give that ground. His post ends on the same message he delivered in person: Australia is his country, and the claim to belonging cannot be revoked by a stranger at an intersection.
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