Racism, Religion and Communalism

Communal tensions in British South Asian communities are on the rise. Conflict between Sikh and Muslimyouths and Hindu and Muslim is becoming a more common occurrence in Asian areas. Religious fanaticism - of thekind that promotes hostility toward others - holds a grip on a small but increasing number. And the tensionson Britain’s streets are increasingly tied to events abroad, not least the US-led ‘war on terrorism’.

In the northern town of Bradford, early last year, violence flared up between Hindu and Muslim communities.And last October in Derby, a 15-year-old Hindu girl was hospitalised following an argument about the events ofSeptember 11. Tensions were already high in the town following the distribution of an anti-Sikh leaflet,credited to the non-existent group ‘Real Khilafah’.

There are less violent signs too. In January, Sunrise Radio - Britain’s ‘leading Asian radio station’- took the bizarre step of banning the word ‘Asian’. This was the culmination of a long campaign by groupssuch as the UK branch of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad that want to dissociate themselves from Muslims in thepublic mind by dropping the secular term ‘Asian’ (which has long been the standard description for thosewho have a heritage in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka). Although the term has always beenproblem­atic, this campaign is premised on the idea that racist whites could be persuaded to exclude Hindusand Sikhs from their hatred and instead focus just on Muslims.

The tendency took on a disturbing twist after September 11 when many South Asians in America became victimsof revenge attacks. Some Sikhs - instead of marching with Muslims and calling for an end to any revengeattacks - marched separately with banners saying ‘we are not Muslims’, as if American Muslims were anymore valid as targets for revenge than they were. And in January 2002, for the first time ever, theextreme-Right, racist British National Party (BNP) managed to convince a tiny faction of Asians - the Shere-e-Punjabgrouping - to co-operate on anti-Muslim propaganda.

Later in the year, three British Muslims on holiday in India were killed in the state-sponsored anti-Muslimpogroms that swept through Gujarat in February and March. On one level these deaths are unrelated todevelopments in Britain. But, with the increase in ideologies and even funds flowing across continents, suchdistinctions become less tenable.

It would be tempting to try and blame just one side for the cycle of mutual demonisation. But, as ArundhatiRoy has written in the context of the Gujarat carnage, for anybody to ‘arbitrarily decree exactly where thecycle started is malevolent and irresponsible’; all sides increasingly resemble each other the more they tryto call attention to their religious differences by casti­gating the other.

As a new generation of British Asians, born in this country in the 1960s and 1970s, occupies more positionsof influence in our communities, it is the future orientation of British Asian life that is at stake. Will webe divided and separated by religion or will we be able to find a place in our lives for both our own faithand an understanding of others, within a secular framework?

The BNP and Shere-e-Punjab

The BNP has had ambitions to pit Hindus and Sikhs against Muslims since Nick Griffin’s successfulleader­ship bid and the subsequent ‘rebranding’ of the party. The focus is now on Islam as the primeenemy facing Britain and the party claims to have abandoned its policy of forcibly repatriating allnon-whites. Of course, the ‘media-savvy’ reinvention of the party is a sham. But for some on the fringesof the Khalistani movement, hatred of Muslims is so strong that even the BNP can be seen as a potential ally.This is ironic as, in India, the Khalistani move­ment has traditionally seen Muslim separatists as friendsand the enemy has been a central govern­ment perceived as Hindu.

The BNP has worked with two Sikhs, Rajinder Singh and Ammo Singh, who have co-operated on the production ofa CD entitled ‘Islam - a threat to us all’. Rajinder Singh has also appeared in the BNP magazine, Spearhead,in which he voices opposition to Britain’s ‘liberal immigration policy’ and congratulates the BNP fortaking a stand against ‘Afghans and Bangla­deshis clutching their copies of the Koran, fighting desperatelyto enter a totally unfamiliar country, settle down, produce children, establish mosques and Al-Qaeda cells andthen begin all over with Holy Jihad in a few years’ time.’ He also urges British voters to support the BNPin the name of those Sikhs who were ‘silenced forever by the Sword of Islam’ in the 1947 partition ofIndia.

Both Singhs are connected with the Shere-e-Punjab (Lions of Punjab) group, which has been active since themid-1980s, operating as part street gang, part political grouping. The organisation has been success­ful inoffering its ‘muscle’ when Sikhs have felt under threat from local Muslims, such as in 1997 when Shere-e-Punjabdescended en masse on the largely Muslim Chalvey housing estate in the town of Slough, to exact revenge forearlier perceived slights. As a political organisation, the group can only claim a handful of poorly organisedmembers. While Ammo and Rajinder Singh claim to be ‘leading figures’, they only represent a marginalfraction of British Sikh communities. Even so, the BBC still saw fit to allow Ammo Singh to appear on Radio 4in July 2001 to praise the BNP.

Islam and the ‘war on terrorism’

Many South Asians in Britain were shocked by Rajinder Singh’s open support for the BNP. Yet anti-Islamicfeeling is becoming increasingly acceptable across society, especially under the guise of the ‘war onterrorism’, and anti-Muslim elements in all communities have found renewed confidence in the wake of Bush’s‘You are either with us or against us’ rhetoric. Hindu nationalists, both in India and the UK, believethat their own Islamophobia has now been vindicated. Meanwhile Muslims are finding that somehow they are allbeing held responsible for the September 11 attack. Muslims are being told that their loyalty to Britain mustcome before their faith, even by liberal commentators such as the Guardian’s Hugo Young.

Shabana Najib, a community worker in Derby, says that following September 11, many Muslim women stoppedgoing out, especially into the town centre. Anyone wearing a headscarf would get nasty comments. ‘Why shouldmy mum or my sister have to hear racist remarks?’ she asks. ‘You can’t go around attacking all Muslimswhen only a tiny number were to blame.’ But as well as the verbal and physical abuse, there is the feelingof always having to explain yourself. As Shabana says, ‘I don’t condone what happened in America, I thinkit was horrendous. But I shouldn’t have to say that. You feel like you have to, because, if you don’t,people don’t necessarily under­stand. We get associated with terrorists and extremists constantly - you can’tmove away from it. You say Islam and automatically somebody is thinking "extremist" or "terrorist".’

In a context in which their faith is constantly being questioned, in schools and workplaces, Muslims arefinding that they have to develop their own personal strategies for handling situations in which they areexpected to be ambassadors for an entire world religion that has suddenly been put under the spot­light. Somehave dealt with this by deepening their awareness of Islam, perhaps reconnecting with a Muslim community theyhad left behind; many have become a lot more aware of events in places like Palestine, Chechnya andAfghanistan. Islamic identity has been strengthened.

In addition, many Hindus and Sikhs have shown little solidarity with Muslims during this period ofheightened anti-Muslim feeling, quickly forgetting their own experiences of racism. As Shabana Najib pointsout, ‘Anybody who has experienced discrimination should have empathy for others who are going through it,not to pity them or sympathise to a great extent, but just to understand the pain.’ Instead, each communityis asking itself ‘what have they ever done for us?’ This has led to much of the common ground betweenMuslims and Asians of other faiths being stripped away.

With these tensions in the air, it has become easier for organised groups or gangs that define themselvesby religion to persuade youngsters to join them. For some, the fear of bullying leads to outside groups being‘called in’ for protection, especially as rumours fly around of the attacks being planned by ‘the otherside’. A lot of youthful male pride is at stake when your faith is being attacked or, worse, when there is aperceived threat to ‘your’ women. For others, these groups pro­vide simple answers to the difficultquestions young Muslims in particular now face. In either case, it feeds the growth of organised groupsprepared to use violence in the name of religion.

The new puritans

Of course, since September 11, all the British media attention has been on Muslim fundamentalists in theUK, such as Abu Hamza al-Masri, of Finsbury Park mosque, and Sheikh Omar Bakri, leader of the Al-Muhajiroungroup, who have become household names. But for all the pages devoted to their ‘links’ to al-Qaeda, littleeffort has been made to place their antics in the wider context of British Islam and point out how small theirrespective followings are. Nor has there been much thought given to what the appeal of groups like Al-Muhajirounmay be to the small number of followers they attract. The constant media coverage has given the impressionthat these tiny groupings are in fact more influential than they are, thereby flattering their own apocalypticpretensions.

Since the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s, there have been growing numbers of youthsattracted to the puritan strands of Islam, in particular the Salafi sect, which makes up a tiny percentage ofthe Muslim population. Although some Salafis support the use of political violence to establish a state basedon Shari’ah law, others emphasise a process of ‘self-rectification’ in which followers embark on apersonal struggle to transform their lifestyle on the model of the Prophet Muhammad.

The puritan movement in Islam is thriving among young men in the UK because it offers a very differentbrand of Islam to that of their parents. The preachers are often more dynamic, younger and able to relate totheir target audience in a way that most mosques, whose Imams have often been brought over from abroad,cannot. Particularly in medium-sized towns, like Luton, the Salafis are recruiting many youngsters who havepreviously dabbled in a life of crime. Well known local criminals have been converted to the Salafi lifestyle,swapping fast cars, womanising and night­clubs for the discipline of a minimum-wage job, voluntary work and astrict personal code covering every aspect of dress, manners and family relations.

At the heart of the appeal, though, is the question of identity. The process of conversion begins by askingwhat it means to be a Muslim. For many, that is not an easy question to answer but for Salafis - who seek topurify Islam of all innovation since the time of Muha­mmad - it means a simple set of lifestyle prescriptsthat remove all the confusions of being Muslim in the modern world. And for many young men, who see otherMuslims suffering globally and connect that suffering to their own experience of racism, such messages have apotent appeal. Which is why Sheikh Omar Bakri places the following lines at the heart of his recruitmentspeeches: ‘They want to keep calling us Pakis, bloody Arabs, brown Kaffirs. So you change your name toBobby. You change all your clothes. You dance. You rave with them. They still call you Paki. You ask, "ForGod’s sake who do I belong to?" You belong to the Muslim ummah, brother, come on in.’

The problem for Muslims generally is that groups like Al-Muhajiroun, which revel in negative publicity andlace their rhetoric with anti-Semitism, homophobia and calls for jihad, have dominated the publicrepre­sent­­ation of Islam. Their presence in a town can be deva­stating. In Luton, the local ‘branch’of Al-Muhajir­oun was attracting national headlines after two men from the town had gone to fight for theTaliban and had been killed in a US bombing raid on Kabul. Al-Muhajiroun, which has just six members in Luton,organised a ‘demonstration’ in memory of the two. Although only ten people turned up, racism against allthe town’s 20,000 Muslims increased. Once again, the majority were forced to suffer for the actions of atiny minority because of a lazy racism that lumps all Mus­lims together. Soon afterwards the leader of Luton’sAl-Muhajiroun, known as ‘Shahed’, was beaten up in the street by ‘moderate’ Muslims and warned offfrom continuing any activities in the town.

Fear and loathing in Derby

In Derby, tensions between Sikhs and Muslims wors­ened following September 11, as rumours spread that Al-Muhajirounwere active in the area distributing anti-Sikh leaflets. A hoax letter, which has been circu­lating on theinternet for some years and aims at fomenting Sikh-Muslim conflict, inflamed the Sikh community when it wasallegedly distributed on Normanton Road, in the heart of Derby’s South Asian comm­unity. The letter accusesthe government of only being interested in funding ‘Gurdwaras and Gays and Homos’ and goes on to suggestthat Muslim boys need ‘to bring Sikh girls into the arms of Islam’ by taking them out on a date - ‘it iseasy to take the Sikh girls out on a date as they generally like a good drink’. There was talk of aboycott of Muslim shops and angry meetings were held at the Gurdwara. With many Sikhs having already moved outof the Normanton area to Derby’s suburbs, those remaining were feeling vulnerable and outnumbered.

Soon afterwards, a dispute between school­girls over the events of September 11 flared up, leading to oneMuslim girl having her headscarf torn. Later, a gang of Muslim boys from outside the school smashed their wayinto a lunch break armed with hammers and axes and attacked pupils. A Hindu girl suffered a fractured skulland spine injuries. So far, a 15-year-old has been charged with racially aggravated wounding and GBH.Community leaders organised meetings to try and avoid a total collapse of trust but, according to ParamdeepSingh Bhatia of the Derby Sikh Youth Association, these meetings were ineffectual. In the end, the gangleaders themselves negotiated a truce.

Bhatia believes that in order for future tensions to be avoided, youths need to be allowed to take theinitiative in seeking solutions. He hopes that forums can be established where young people of differentfaiths can develop a mutual respect. For others, the incident highlighted how women are sidelined. ‘You getquite frustrated with men wanting to fight things out, rather than wanting to talk,’ says Shabana Najib. ‘Whyis it that men feel the need to protect us and yet never ask for our views on it? A lot of the women that Icome across are quite frustrated about the way things were dealt with.’

Britain’s Hindu Right

Hinduism is often thought of as a religion that is inherently tolerant and humane, yet Hindu comm­unitiestoo have their small minority of active ‘funda­ment­alists’, who often escape scrutiny because of thereligion’s repu­tation for peacefulness. Few are aware of the history of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) inIndia: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which was formed in the 1920s on the model of Mussolini’sBrown Shirts, or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Muslims in Gujaratearlier this year.

In Britain, the offshoots of these groups pre­sent themselves as cultural and social organisations anddownplay their political agenda. But hostility to Muslims is never far away. According to an attendee at arecent VHP meeting in Southall, held in response to the situ­ation in Gujarat, speakers demanded thatnon-Hindus should be made to leave India. And the writer Sunil Khilnani has described attending the ‘Festivalof Hindu Youth’, recently held in north London, at which speakers ‘worked the audience in televangelicalstyle, exhorting the youngsters to stand up for their Hindu religion, to defend their caste identities, and toface down other religions that might intimidate them - especially Muslims.’ Yet the UK branch of the VHP hasalso been given a platform in the mainstream media, such as the Telegraph and Talk Radio, as therepresent­ative voice of Hindus, particularly after last summer’s riots.

As in India, the Hindutva movement in Britain operates through a number of linked organisations eachpresenting a different face for different purposes. The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), which is a registeredcharity, describes itself as a cultural organ­isation ‘right at the core of being British and Hindu’,according to spokesman Manoj Ladwa. Although he claims HSS has a ‘distinct identity in the UK’ from itsIndian equivalent, the RSS, he does accept that it shares ‘common roots and beliefs’ with the Indiananti-Islamic paramilitary group.

HSS organises youth ‘training camps’, regularly invites RSS speakers from India to UK events andorganises fund­raising such as the ‘Hindu marathon’. The next training camp is to be held over ten daysat the end of July 2002 in Hounslow, west London, and will be attended by around 100 youths. The well-knowncharity Sewa International which, according to Ladwa, is ‘managed by HSS’ shares an address with HSS, asdoes the National Hindu Students Forum, which has a fluctuating membership in the low thousands.

The support for groups like HSS and VHP in the UK rests on a mixture of motivations. As described above,for many economically successful Hindus, particularly entrepreneurs from East African Asian merchantcommunities, Hindu chauvinism aims at a dissoc­iation from less well-off Pakistani and Bangladeshicomm­unities who are seen as giving Asians a bad name. This snobbery feeds into wider fears of Islam as afunda­mentalist religion and is supported by the idea that Muslims have historically been ‘invaders’ ofthe Hindu homeland.