Why only Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman could call out the grooming gangs

Some will undoubtedly point to the Indian roots of both the British Prime Minister and the Home Secretary when analysing the reasons for and implication of the newly announced UK policy to no longer hide the ethnicity of members of the country’s notorious “grooming gangs”. Charges of racism and ‘dog whistling’ have been levelled by the opposition, implying that only a particular ‘South Asian’ community is in the crosshairs of the ruling Conservatives. For quite a while now, it’s been “Good things South Asian, bad things Indian” in at least the English-speaking West, with the additional caveat that under no circumstances should other parts of the subcontinent be named if the narrative is unpleasant. So when it comes to the latest US bugbear—caste—it was okay to mention India, but Pakistani Britons were never to be cited in the context of grooming gangs preying on young white girls across cities in Britain. Old habits die hard, of course, so most of the UK media when reporting on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s new initiative still go only as far as to say British-Asian, stopping short of the P-word. This despite the fact that a 2020 Home Office investigation into the gangs concluded that “cultural sensitivities” prevented authorities from cracking down on perpetrators, implying ethnicity was a factor. That this would further embolden criminals was clearly overlooked. Sunak’s revelation that cases and whistle-blowers had been “often ignored” by social workers not to mention police—no doubt abetted by local politicians—in Telford, Rotherham and Rochdale because of political correctness is shameful. And the UK opposition’s predictable response that grooming gang predators are mostly white simply proves that ‘conscious bias’ (unlike the ‘unconscious’ one cited by western wokerati) is increasingly acceptable in ‘liberal’ circles. Nazir Ahmed, the vociferously anti-India British Labour Party peer of Pakistani origin—Lord Ahmed of Rotherham—who forfeited his seat after being convicted in January 2022 for three sex crimes that he perpetrated in the 1970s, is just the tip of a very seamy iceberg. In other Rotherham cases, five British-Pakistani men were convicted in 2010, and then after sustained public and media pressure a total of 19 men and two women were also found guilty in 2016 and 2018. In the case of the Rochdale grooming gang trial over a decade ago, of the nine men (ranging in age from 24 to 59) convicted of sex trafficking, rape and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child, eight were British Pakistani and one an Afghan asylum-seeker. Three of them were stripped of their British nationality later and Pakistani media was more forthright in its reportage of those trials and convictions than their politically correct UK counterparts! After restrictions were lifted on reportage of the trial of grooming gangsters of Huddersfield in 2018, the public learnt that 19 of those convicted were of Pakistani origin, with only one a (non-practising) Sikh. They were found guilty of 120 counts of raping and sexually abusing 15 girls—some only 11 years old—between 2004 and 2011. The Sikh community was outraged that one of their own had done such despicable acts; presumably, Pakistani circles were too. Sajid Javid, the Pakistani-origin Home Secretary in 2018, had called them “sick Asian paedophiles” in a tweet and added the victims had been ignored for “too long” and that “there will be no no-go areas” on his watch. Labour Party had objected at that time too, calling it a “toxic racist agenda” but Javid did not back down. Instead, he went further and said those convicted for gang-based child sexual exploitation were mostly from “Pakistani heritage backgrounds”. The current British Home Secretary Suella Braverman almost echoed Javid last week when she said, “What’s clear is that what we’ve seen is a practice whereby vulnerable white English girls, sometimes in care, sometimes who are in challenging circumstances, being pursued and raped and drugged and harmed by gangs of British-Pakistani men who’ve worked in child abuse rings or networks.” She has certainly been braver than most white men on this issue! Squeamishness about crimes committed by minorities has had unfortunate consequences in other parts of the world. It has not only made larger communities fearful, it has also led to more muscle flexing by minority gangs who see restraint as a sign of weakness, which only exacerbates tension rather than reducing it. Anonymity and evasion of prosecution in UK because of ethnicity is unthinkable for white criminals today; so why should non-whites ones be exempt? Logically speaking, in today’s Britain, only South Asian-origin political leaders would have the gumption to take on the wokerati and call out political correctness as being inherently detrimental to justice and good governance. Their white counterparts—in politics and other spheres—have lost the will to take a resolute stand on this matter long ago, as they now fear accusations of unconscious bias more than anything else. They also now believe that white is never right. Points often cited about grooming gangs are that the Home Office report had said they mostly comprised white men under 30 and that there was not enough proof that such sex offenders were more likely to be Asian or Black. Considering the prevailing zeitgeist of pulling no punches when it comes to anything to do with whites, why had minding ‘cultural sensitivities’ become so important then for investigators if the perpetrators are not mostly Pakistani-Brits anyway? The West, including the UK, never misses a chance to deliver homilies to India about the criminal justice system, where factors like community, caste or political affiliations still determine whether cases are even registered, much less followed through till conviction. Now it seems UK—from whom India inherited many procedures, laws and punishments—has been going the desi way for some time, following the dictum, “Show me the person and I will show you the rule.” What the UK needs is open and very well-publicised trials of grooming gangs—whatever their ethnicity. If most of the men caught and convicted indeed turn out to be white, it will go a long way in calming existing racial mistrust and tensions. If they are from ethnic minorities then their respective communities can be mobilised to counsel the men to dissuade them from continuing their activities. Any which way, an honest approach is better than a politically correct one. And it is time Britain and the rest of the world—especially their media—realise that there are many ‘ethnicities’ and communities among the two billion people who live in or hail from ‘South Asia’. Calling non-white members of criminal British grooming gangs ‘South Asian’ is as ignorant and insulting as describing rampaging British lager louts as ‘West European’. And Indians are not the only South Asians who feel offended at being tarred by the same brush. The author is a freelance writer. 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 .