UK: How Conservatives' recognition of Hinduphobia and grooming gang threat is a mere political move 

Much is being made by the Indian media of assorted reports, including quasi-official institutional bodies, on the idea that Hinduphobia affects British Hindus negatively. It is being suggested that Hinduphobia is quite widespread in a report on British schools by researcher Charlotte Littlewood of the Henry Jackson Society. It has prompted a degree of the usual unseemly jubilation among Hindu activists that the phenomenon has finally been accorded quasi-official recognition by their social betters and racial superiors. The public discussions on Hinduphobia have also resulted in British Hindu activists trying to define Hinduphobia and hope some sort of unfathomable official action will follow to curb it since the existence of the problem is now supposedly accepted officially by Britain. Unfortunately, there is much more to the whole issue than meets the eye. Hindu activists are also acting in ways that will turn out to be inimical to Hindus and especially India. There is no innocence in politics and cynicism is usually its abiding constant. The whole issue of Hinduphobia in Britain is what should be termed a put up job. To put it bluntly, the British Conservatives have sponsored the angst-ridden debate on Hinduphobia. They have mobilised both research institutions and a thoroughly compromised British Hindu leadership to promote the idea for electoral reasons. The strategy is to capitalise on the real fright many Hindu voters suffered in the aftermath of the recent attacks on their property and temples in Leicester, with some families even beginning to abandon the city. It is hoped fearful Hindus will vote en masse in the impending 2024 general elections for the Conservatives, as their sole potential protectors. Of course, the insinuation is that the Labour Party can do nothing for them because it is a prisoner of a decisive Muslim vote bank. The disciplined Muslim vote bank can indeed dictate outcomes in anything up to eighty parliamentary constituencies, dominated by British-Pakistani dual nationals. The British Indian-origin Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, did prompt surprise by identifying Pakistani men as grooming gang perpetrators of the widespread rape of mainly White adolescents, as well as some others, for more than two decades. It is reported, there were at least fifty thousand White teenage victims of grooming and rape, including some Sikhs and Hindus. For long, the rapists were unfailingly being described as “Asian”, besmirching the inhabitants of an entire geographical region, to obscure the identity of the rapists. This cowardly obfuscation occurred not so much out of political correctness than fear of lone wolf terrorist attacks by disgruntled Pakistani Muslims. Local Labour Party politicians were deeply implicated in the scandal, with one former Labour Party prime minister suggesting the rape victims had made informed choices about their sexual relationships. At a crucial moment during the prolonged sordid grooming and rape episode, the incumbent Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, the probable Prime Minister in 2024 was the Director of Public Prosecutions, when inaction over the epidemic of rapes is alleged. Significantly, such grooming gang rapes, which were occurring across the length and breadth of the country, have not ceased and it is estimated there are still twenty thousand annual victims. However, there is a larger political context to the issue of Hinduphobia and identification of Pakistani men as the perpetrators of grooming gang rapes. During the 2019 British general elections, the populist dissimulator Boris Johnson made significant inroads into the traditional Labour heartlands of the British Midlands and Northern England. He had successfully used popular opposition in these regions to mass immigration from the European Union as the basis for mobilising voters to support Brexit. But the Conservative Party is now facing an electoral rout in 2024, with a flailing Labour Party still enjoying a 30 per cent lead over it in opinion polls. If the opinion polls are correct and they surely cannot be completely wrong, even with a large margin of polling error, the Conservative Party is facing a wipeout and most of its parliamentary party would be decimated. The reason for the dire situation is due to the Conservative Party members recently choosing Liz Truss as prime minister over Rishi Sunak at the leadership contest. She then proceeded to wreck the British economy comprehensively, which Rishi Sunak had presciently warned would happen if she carried out her proposed economic policies in their debates with each other. But Liz Truss was still chosen instead of the current incumbent, the competent Rishi Sunak, because the party membership preferred a White blonde to a diminutive brown-skinned Indian. In the aftermath of the carnage caused by Liz Truss, the Conservative Party leadership was likely to read the riot act by financiers of the City of London. The financiers told the Conservative Party leadership to ensure the appointment in her place of Rishi Sunak, whom they evidently trust, to salvage the wrecked British economy. The City of London provides 30 per cent of all tax revenues in the UK and has compelling influence over the entire political class, overblown British pretensions of democratic pluralism notwithstanding. The subsequent leadership contest was allegedly differentially manipulated by the party leadership to prevent Rishi Sunak’s rivals emerging victorious, much to the chagrin of Conservative Party members, who were not chastened at all by their folly in electing Liz Truss. Given a choice, with old rules still in place for electing leaders, they would have re-appointed Boris Johnson, whatever the long-term consequences of a return to his thoroughly mendacious policies. There is why the Conservative Party’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, have suddenly highlighted the Pakistani identity of the grooming gang rapists. The Conservative Party, paradoxically led by a Hindu and Buddhist, is trying to retrieve the loss of support among the White working class of the Midlands and the North of England owing to the disastrous economic experiment of Liz Truss. The xenophobia incited by the cynical populist Boris Johnson to win the Brexit vote and emerging victorious in the subsequent parliamentary 2019 is being succeeded by another racially-inspired ploy of identifying men of Pakistani and Muslim religious origin as the grooming gang rapists. Yet, the reasons for officially identifying them as the perpetrators of monstrous crimes is entirely reasonable instead of the antecedent egregious slander of insisting they were all “Asian”, but the reasons for doing so are cynical and political. The Conservative Party is provoking a White working class backlash by highlighting that little White girls were being raped by brown Muslim men, allegations that once routinely led to lynching in the American Deep South. It is a potent political strategy because the trope will surely arouse primitive emotions among the White working class and the Labour Party, dependent on Muslim votes to survive electorally, is impaled on the horns of an insuperable dilemma. They can neither deny the truth of the allegations of the Pakistani identity of the grooming gang rapists to appease their Muslim constituency or accept it to counter the Conservative Party’s attempt to incite the White working class. To be continued… This is part one of Gautam Sen’s series on Politics of Hinduphobia in Britain. The writer taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News, Trending News,  Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.