Opinion Terror at Bondi beach raises a deeper question: How do societies respond to violence without surrendering the values that make them open?

The details are still being pieced together, but their cumulative meaning is already clear. Violence directed at a religious community, in one of the country’s most cherished public spaces, strikes at the core of plural life. That it occurred during a festival centred on light, renewal and resilience only deepens the sense of moral revulsion. Terrorism and extremism are not distorted forms of politics or belief; they are assaults on the very possibility of shared civic life and deserve unequivocal moral repudiation.

I write this not as a distant observer, but as someone who has lived for many years in Melbourne and continues to spend time in Australia. For me and my family, Australia’s commitment to an open, everyday peace has carried particular meaning, shaped as we are by memories of conflict in Kashmir, where the fragility of coexistence was learnt not in theory but through loss. Australian decency is rarely performative. It is quiet, habitual, embedded in ordinary interactions on beaches, in trams, in neighbourhoods where pluralism is practised rather than proclaimed. Bondi, in that sense, is not exceptional; it is emblematic of a broader social ethic.

It is also why violence there feels so dislocating. Bondi is democratic, and unpretentious. It belongs to no one and everyone at once. Families, migrants, tourists, worshippers, surfers and joggers share the same stretch of sand, bound by an unspoken social contract of mutual regard. When violence intrudes into such a space, it punctures more than physical safety. It unsettles the assumption that shared spaces are sustained by trust rather than fear.

Public spaces like Bondi matter because they are where societies rehearse everyday coexistence. They are where strangers encounter difference without anxiety, where diversity becomes ordinary through repetition and habit. Violence in such spaces is never random in its effects. Its real power lies in its ability to make people see one another differently, to replace ease with suspicion, familiarity with vigilance, and openness with withdrawal.

The Bondi attack also reflects a wider and troubling trend. Antisemitism, once assumed to have been relegated to history in liberal democracies, has returned to public life. Not always through organised movements or formal politics, but through the slow normalisation of hostility and the targeting of communities in spaces once considered unquestionably safe. Extremist violence feeds on this climate, drawing legitimacy from silence or equivocation.

Australia has long taken pride — with justification — in having kept large-scale political violence at the margins of its public life. Its institutional resilience, social trust, and post-Port Arthur gun control regime (the regulations that followed a mass shooting that occurred in 1996 in Port Arthur, a tourist town in Tasmania) have often been cited as safeguards against patterns seen elsewhere. That record now feels newly fragile, not because it has failed, but because it must be actively renewed.

From an Indian vantage point, this vulnerability is deeply familiar. India has lived for decades with the reality that terrorism and communal violence are not merely about spectacular acts. Their most enduring damage lies in the slow erosion of civic trust. Markets, buses, places of worship and public square: Once violence enters these spaces, everyday life itself becomes politicised. The aftermath of violence can matter as much as the violence itself. Overreaction can hollow out public life; underreaction can embolden extremism. Most dangerously, the search for easy explanations rooted in identity, faith or origin can fracture societies far more deeply than the original act.

This is the wider debate into which Bondi must be located. What is at stake is not only policing or intelligence failures, important though these are. The deeper question is normative: How do societies respond to terror and violence without surrendering the values that make them open?

Bondi Beach forces Australians and others watching closely to confront a difficult paradox. Openness is both a strength and a vulnerability. Beaches, parks, festivals and markets are powerful symbols of democratic life precisely because they are open and shared. But that same openness makes them targets for those who seek to disrupt coexistence.

As someone shaped by both Indian and Australian experiences, I am acutely aware that plural societies endure not because they eliminate difference, but because they domesticate it through restraint, mutual recognition and everyday decency. These achievements are fragile, sustained less by declarations than by repeated acts of civic courage.

Australia’s response in the days ahead will matter well beyond its borders. Not only in how it delivers justice or strengthens security, but in how it speaks about belonging, responsibility and restraint.

Bondi Beach will recover. The sand will be cleared, routines restored, life resumed. But the deeper task is moral and political: To ensure that what Bondi represents — openness, ease, shared life — is not quietly surrendered in the name of safety.

For Australia, as for India, the lesson is stark and shared: The defence of open societies lies not in retreat, but in the steady, everyday work of living together without fear.

The writer is dean, School of International Studies, JNU, and honorary professor, University of Melbourne