The Victorian Government says it hopes another attack on an Indian man in Melbourne will not dissuade people from considering Australia as a safe place to study, work and live.
An Indian man is in hospital after being set on fire in the street in Melbourne early yesterday morning.
Jaspreet Singh, 29, was attacked in Essendon in Melbourne's north-west shortly before 2.00am (AEDT).
He had just come home from a dinner party with his wife and went to park his car when four men poured fluid over him and set him alight.
He is in a stable condition in the Alfred Hospital with burns to 20 per cent of his body.
Victorian Minister Peter Batchelor says the Government hopes the incident will not harm people's views of Australia.
"We don't support any sorts of violence at all irrespective of who it is against, whether it is against people who are born and live here or whether it is for all of the fantastic migrants or refugees or students who come to our country," he said.
"Whether it is racially motivated or whether is is for some other reason such as theft or some other crime related factor, it diminishes our community, it diminishes us all and we're totally opposed to it.
"We want the police to thoroughly investigate this to get to the bottom of it."
Police say the strange circumstances surrounding the attack have led them to believe it was not racially motivated.
Detective acting senior sergeant Neil Smyth says police are yet to locate burnt clothing the victim discarded shortly after the incident.
He says police have a general description of who the offenders could be.
"I believe there is no reason at this stage to consider this in any way as racially motivated... the circumstances of him parking the car randomly in a side street and just some people approaching him are a bit strange," he said.
"It's highly unlikely therefore to be a targeted attack on any individual."
Police say the man is of Indian origin but they do not know whether he is an Australian citizen.
Friends say the man is living in the city on a spouse visa.
It has been a week since 21-year-old Indian man Nitin Garg was stabbed to death on his way to work in West Footscray.
The murder has sparked outrage in India and among Indians in Melbourne, who say racist attacks are on the rise.
Gautam Gupta from the Federation of Indian Students of Australia says the attacks are unacceptable and the Federal Government must act.
"We are extremely disturbed, we have contacted the Prime Minister's office and have suggested that they intervene, it's high time they intervene," he said.
"How many times are they going to just dodge this issue."
Cartoon 'hysteria'
Yesterday the editor of an Indian newspaper said Australia was reacting hysterically to a cartoon depicting an Australian police officer as a member of the Ku Klux Klan .
The cartoon shows a person in a Ku Klux Klan hood wearing a police badge, with a caption that reads: "We are yet to ascertain the nature of the crime".
The editor of the Mail Today newspaper, Bharat Bhushan, has defended his decision to publish the controversial cartoon.
Mr Bhushan has also defended the paper's cartoonist, R Prasad, who drew the piece in response to attacks on young Indian men in Melbourne.
"What he does is he exaggerates things," Mr Bhushan said.
"He forces people to look at a particular point of view, which we had thought in a mature society like Australia would lead to introspection, rather it has led to hysteria."
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has expressed outrage at the cartoon's Ku Klux Klan reference.
"Any suggestion of that kind is deeply, deeply offensive to the police officers involved and I would absolutely condemn the making of a comment like that," Ms Gillard said.
"[The police] have indeed worked in close collaboration with representatives of the Indian community as they've gone about this step up in policing."
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