A cartoon in the Australian depicting starving Indians chopping up and eating solar panels sent to the developing nation in an attempt to curb carbon emissions has been condemned as “unequivocally racist”.

Drawn by the veteran cartoonist Bill Leak, Monday’s cartoon was his response to the climate deal signed in Paris at the weekend. India is the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse emitter.

Amanda Wise, an associate professor of sociology at Macquarie University, said in her view the cartoon was shocking and would be unacceptable in the UK, the US or Canada.

“This cartoon is unequivocally racist and draws on very base stereotypes of third world, underdeveloped people who don’t know what to do with technology,” Wise told Guardian Australia.

“India is the technology centre of the world right now and has some of the most high-tech industries on the planet in that part of the world. The underlying message is that people in developing countries don’t need all these technologies to do with climate change – they need food.

“But actually it is people living in poverty that will suffer the most through food security, sea level rises, dropping of the water table.”

The editor of the Australian, Clive Mathieson, confirmed he edited Monday’s paper but declined to comment on the Leak cartoon.

The Australian’s long-serving editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell left the company last week and Paul Whittaker is installed as editor-in-chief, with Michelle Gunn staying on as editor of the Weekend Australian.

Wise said: “I don’t know too many places in the world where you would get away with that to be honest. In the UK and the US there would be an incredible outcry. It is appalling.

“This is really old imagery he has drawn on. Thin, starving people wearing turbans, who are so starving they are going to chop up solar panels. That is 1950s symbolism. We have moved on. The rest of the world has moved on.

“In Australia people from India are the second largest migrant group and they are coming here on skilled visas.”

The Australian’s cartoon has provoked anger in India. “This only demonstrates the … provincial ignorance of both the journalist, cartoonist and publication,” said Shoma Chaudhury, editor of Catch News and a well-known local journalist.

“India has not only been a sophisticated negotiator on climate change, insisting ‘developed’ nations pay their dues for destroying the planet, it has also voluntarily started adopting renewables like solar energy in hundreds of villages. It has not needed to be browbeaten into climate intelligence or consciousness, unlike many developed nations.

“In truth, the bewildered farmers in Leak’s cartoon could probably teach him a thing or two about solar panels, while treating him to the indisputable pleasures of mango chutney.”

Leak’s cartoon was widely condemned on Twitter, with many users drawing attention to India’s rapidly developing sustainable energy sector.



How backward is Aust #climate politics? Here, the absurd racist rubbish published by Murdoch's national newspaper pic.twitter.com/V6BG2VVnq4 — David Pope (@davpope) December 13, 2015

Hey Bill Leak, some facts on India's renewable energy sector. They're a lot smarter than your cartoons are funny. https://t.co/3hkkSwpmk3 — Mr Denmore (@MrDenmore) December 14, 2015

How can @rupertmurdoch publish something as awful as this Bill Leak cartoon? https://t.co/MIBOc3a26k — Dennis Long (@dennislong1950) December 14, 2015

Deakin University Prof Yin Paradies, whose research includes the economic effects of racism, also took the view the cartoon’s message was clearly racist.

“The message ... is that India is too stupid to handle renewable energy and should stick to coal,” Paradies told Guardian Australia. “Suggesting that ‘developing nations are stupid’ is racist given that such nations are invariably associated with specific racial groups (ie non-whites).”

Leak, who joined the Australian from the Sydney Morning Herald in 1994, has been accused of becoming more conservative in recent years. He has addressed this criticism head-on, saying it had nothing to do with a serious accident after falling from a balcony.



“While trawling through a number of popular leftwing blogs recently, I realised I had to accept a painful reality: I have become a rabid right winger and a Murdoch toady,” Leak wrote in 2012.

“It seems widely accepted that this terrible turn of events is attributable to the fact that I recently had an accident, after which I had to undergo brain surgery.

“Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend, and that means the freedom to offend anyone.

“Neither cartoonists nor journalists should be required to exempt certain groups within society from this general rule when expressing their views. I don’t want to be protected from anybody’s views, especially not from those I find personally repugnant, because it’s often when finding yourself in violent disagreement with certain ideas that you’re best able to clarify your own.”

Leak declined to comment on the criticism of Monday’s cartoon.

India took one of the hardest public lines at the climate change talks in Paris, and in the lead-up to them. Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, has publicly argued that it would be “morally wrong” to let rich countries off the hook for their historical emissions. The country has also stood by its decision to use massive quantities of highly polluting coal to power growth over coming decades, all while increasing the proportion of renewable energy.

With many of its cities enveloped in toxic smog for weeks and a series of extreme weather events in recent years, the environmental problems in India are clear and the deal in Paris has received a cautious welcome in the world’s biggest democracy.

“India has reasons to be satisfied with the Paris agreement on climate change that was finalised on Saturday night,” said the IndianExpress newspaper.

However the newspaper noted concerns about the “inclusion of one line which might prove to be a big irritant in [Indian] plans to build coal-fired power plants.”

A cartoon in the New York Times published during the negotiations also prompted strong reactions in India. It showed India as an elephant blocking the forward progress of the “climate talks train”.

Last year Fairfax Media was forced to apologise after an outcry over a cartoon by Glen Le Lievre in the Sydney Morning Herald, which was criticised by many, including the Australian, as racist and antisemitic.

A columnist, Gerard Henderson, writing under the heading SMH gives antisemitism a chance, condemned the cartoon as a depiction of a “stereotypical Jew of recent memory” with a hook nose, kippah and star of David.

Another columnist for the Australian, Michael Gawenda, said it “recycled the sort of cartoon image of Jews that was standard fare in Nazi publications”.

Fairfax apologised a week later, saying it was wrong to publish the cartoon in its original form.