Laboured Victory

The 2001 general elections in Britian will go down in history as the election the British Asians lost. Otherwise, the results were hardly a ripple against forecasts—Prime Minister Tony Blair repeated his landslide victory, the Tories remained low and the Liberal Democrats, the country's Third Force, remained third, albeit slightly less distant than where they were placed in 1997. It was as if the election did not happen at all.

But the results brought gloom to the tetchy world of Asians in Britain. And that when here too on the surface all remained exactly as before—Keith Vaz, Piara Singh Khabra, Ashok Kumar, Marsha Singh and Mohammed Sarwar were all re-elected; two new members made their debut. Tory candidate Shailesh Vara was expected to only nearly win and he only nearly did. Nothing was gained, nothing lost and yet the results were far from status quo.

The election results were no lifestyle survey. However, they did testify to the attitude prevailing in the South Asian society of Britain—of a divided com-munity rocked by racial prejudices, Hindu-Muslim bitterness and sleaze.

Take Vaz, who won as expected. In the last election, he brought Labour its biggest swing in his constituency of Leicester East. This time around, he returned with an 8 per cent loss of votes, largely because of the media focus on his involvement in sleaze. No wonder thousands came out to vote against Vaz. Though his margin was down from the 18,422 of 1997, he was still comfortably home with 13,442 votes. The Tories nearly bagged 10,000 votes in a constituency where they were nowhere. Vaz won the vote but he seemed to have lost some of the argument, and much of his former solidity.

The results from Leicester East mask only very thinly a massive white backlash against Vaz. About 40 per cent of the 65,527 voters in Leicester East are Asians, mostly Gujaratis. The conservatives are so little a force among them that Tory candidate John Mugglestone hardly cared to woo them. With a voter turnout of 40,661 in this election, Vaz got 23,402 of these, mostly from Asians who turn out in numbers far higher than whites. Which means Mugglestone's 9,960 votes were strong white stuff against Vaz.

What the results can't show is whether the vote was against Vaz or his colour. But such doubts were removed in Oldham. Leader of the racist British National Party (bnp) Nick Griffin came third in Oldham West, the area torn by racial riots in the weeks leading to the election. Griffin polled 6,552 votes—one in seven—to produce the best ever result for the bnp. In neighbouring Oldham East, a bnp taxi driver contested to win over 5,000 votes, more than one in 10 cast. This was the first time the bnp saved its deposit in north England.

"White people have lodged their protest against racist attacks through the ballot box," Griffin said after the election. "Young men feel there is nothing for them in the political process. Now they know there is someone standing up for them. It means these youngsters can get involved in the political process and have a voice." The ominous meaning of these words wasn't lost on Asians. Since the bnp candidates were barred from the traditional speeches as the results came in, they wore gags over their mouths in protest. There was no need to say anything; the impact of their vote was felt right across Britain.

"We've been taking it for granted that all is well," Lord Bhiku Parekh, political scientist and member of the House of Lords, told Outlook."But there are deep undercurrents of concern in English society that their country is becoming internally divided. This has been a backlash from the far right but if a backlash were to come from the middle classes, that would be disastrous." Pithily, the weakening of the Tories can strengthen parties such as the bnp.

The race issue kept surfacing in these elections. The slick Shailesh Vara whom the Tories fielded in Northampton South ran into the issue just as his campaign began. Racist voters would vote against him, his Labour opponent Tony Clarke said. Sure of winning, Vara defiantly bought a house in the constituency. He lost by 885 votes (the Tory candidate in the 1997 election had lost by 774). This constituency was once a Tory stronghold. That Vara could not regain it could well be due to the kind of voters Clarke spoke of.

Where the white vote hasn't targeted Asians, there they have chosen to hit out at one another. Constituencies dominated by Asians resembled a classic Uttar Pradesh election contest. So in Ealing Southall, local businessman Avtar Lit, who is the boss of Sunrise Radio, contested as an independent to protest against sitting Labour MP Piara Singh Khabra. And he scored a moral victory of sorts with 5,764 votes to Khabra's 22,239. The vote for Lit came entirely from the Punjabi community in Southall. Khabra lost about 12.5 per cent of the vote from the last election, almost the same as the percentage of votes Lit polled. Again, Khabra won this time with 13,683 votes; in 1997, when he did not have a fellow Punjabi to fight, his victory margin was 21,423. Much of Khabra's vote was traditional Labour vote in the constituency, most of which is white. He may have won his seat but now sits on a massive Punjabi rejection within Southall. The winner, who began life as a schoolteacher in Hoshiarpur, still carries with him a somewhat brusque headmaster manner while Lit oozed appeal over his Sunrise Radio.

Infighting among Punjabis continued in Bradford West where Marsha Singh, the Punjab-born Labour candidate, beat Conservative Mohammed Riaz by 4,165 votes. This was their second contest—and the results were not very different. This constituency has the strongest Pakistani population in Britain. Marsha Singh replaced earlier Labour candidate Max Madden, who used to be among the strongest critics of India's Kashmir policy in the House of Commons. Singh adopted an even stronger line against India on Kashmir in her bid to win over the Pakistani constituents.

But the Pakistani voters here, as before, are split between Singh—who is Labour and echoes their views on Kashmir but who is Indian—and Mohammed Riaz, a strong leader in Bradford who has on his side what in Uttar Pradesh would be bluntly known as the "Muslim factor". It's a strong factor in Bradford. Riaz polled 14,236 votes to Marsha Singh's 18,401. That's not very different from the 18,932 votes she got to Riaz's 15,055 back in 1997. The Conservatives on their own have little support in Bradford. The vote for the Tories here is really a strong Pakistani endorsement for Riaz, a vote the Tories are looking to work to their advantage.

Overnight, the optimism for a political future for Asians that could be at least representative of their numbers has vanished. In proportion to the population, there should have been 25 Asian MPs in the House of Commons, not the seven that there are now. And even seven seems a fair number given these election results—which point to an Asian community divided among themselves, rejected by others.