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Since the July 7 bombings much attention has been
focused on the
Muslim community, while attacks on Hindus and
Sikhs have been largely
ignored. Shivani Nagarajah talks to non-Muslim
Asians about feeling
under siege.
If you travel on London's public-transport system
you may have
spotted them: stickers and T-shirts with "Don't
freak, I'm a Sikh"
written across them. On the tube, they tend to
be greeted with wry
smiles, but they have sparked heated debate on
Sikh online message
boards. "Don't wear these T-shirts, they're
anti-Muslim," writes one
contributor. "We should wear the T-shirts,"
says another. "We need to
think of ourselves first - let the Muslims take
care of themselves."
In the weeks following July 7 it was widely reported
that hate crimes
against Asians had increased dramatically. They
were not just attacks
on Muslim Asians, of course: they were attacks
on Asians of all
faiths. The fact is that your average hate-crime
perpetrator isn't
going to stop and ask what religion you are before
attacking you - or
even care, for that matter, about such distinctions.
But this point
seems to have been lost on the media. There's
been a huge focus on
the impact on Britain's Muslim community, but
the plight of Britain's
560,000 Hindus and 340,000 Sikhs has been largely
ignored.
So to what extent have non-Muslim Asians been
the victims of hate
crimes? On July 7, as speculation grew that the
London bombs were the
work of Islamist extremists, the first reported
hate crime took place
in Erith, Kent: a Sikh gurdwara (place of worship)
was firebombed.
Since then the Sikh Federation (UK), a lobby group
which represents
more than 150 Sikh organisations, has recorded
five further attacks
on gurdwaras and two serious assaults on Sikh
individuals. And as
Jagtar Singh, of the federation's national executive
council, points
out, there is a huge problem of under-reporting,
particularly in the
case of less serious attacks. "For every
crime reported to the
authorities, we estimate another 30 to 40 that
go unreported," he
says.
Dal Singh Dhesy, a community worker with the Sikh
community and youth
centre in Handsworth, Birmingham, thinks that
Sikhs have had a worse
time of it than Muslims - because of their turbans.
There is a grim
irony to this: turbans are a potent symbol of
Sikh identity, but,
somehow, certain sections of the white population
have come to
(wrongly) associate them with Islamist extremists.
"The turban-
wearing Sikh community is under siege," he
says. He experiences name-
calling and stares from white people on a daily
basis, and describes
other Sikhs facing physical attack and intimidation.
This doesn't mean that Hindus have had an easy
time of it. "There are
issues of security for Hindu temples, Hindu students
at university
and Hindus walking on the streets who risk being
assaulted," says
Ramesh Kallidai, secretary general of the Hindu
Forum of Britain,
which speaks for 240 Hindu organisations.
Ishvar Guruswamy is a Hindu who has lived in Kent
for 32 years. He
had never experienced racism until shortly after
the attempted
bombings in London, when a group of teenagers
spat at him while
shouting, "Bomb, bomb, bomb." A few
days later, a family at his local
supermarket shouted the same thing at him. When
he told his sister
what had happened, her advice was simple - to
shave off his beard and
wear a large crucifix so no one would mistake
him for a Muslim.
He has not followed her advice, but others are
making an effort to
advertise their faith. Ratnes Kandiah, a Hindu
grandmother from east
London, says: "When I go out I'm very ashamed
because people don't
know if I'm Hindu or Muslim." She has started
wearing an extra large
pottu, the red spot that Hindu women wear on their
forehead, in the
perhaps optimistic belief that people will understand
its
significance."I try to order pork and make
sure that people hear me,"
says Mital Pankhania, a Hindu optometrist in his
late 20s who lives
in Derby. "If there are strangers around
I make a point of saying
that I drink. It's a bit like being a Canadian
and always having to
tell people you're not American."
Tariq Modood, professor of sociology at Bristol
University, says it's
understandable that Sikhs and Hindus should attempt
to distance
themselves from Muslims. "If a group has
bad press or is seen as
likely to drag you down in terms of your social
status or the way you
are perceived by the rest of society, then you
want to distance
yourselves from that group," he says. "At
the moment, Muslims are
certainly playing that role for other south Asians."
Does he blame
non-Muslims for backing away from Muslims? "Their
motives are not
good, they're selfish, but on the whole ... I
don't deplore it, I
regret it."
Of course, the divisions between different Asian
groups didn't start
on 7/7. In Derby, Pankhania says that although
he has a mixed circle
of friends, including Sikhs and white Christians,
there are no
Muslims among them. "I went to university
in Bradford," he says. "I
really grew to despise them [Muslims]. It didn't
come from my parents
but from my first-hand experience of living with
them." Such
attitudes are not uncommon.
It wasn't always this way. Many of the older generation
of Sikhs,
Hindus and Muslims speak with real sadness about
how things have
changed. They describe how the early south Asian
settlers to Britain
saw one another as brothers and sisters, unified
by a common heritage
and shared sense of isolation. Until the 1980s,
Asians organised
collectively, with groups such as the Bradford
Asian Youth Movement
cutting across religious divisions. All this came
to an end with the
Salman Rushdie affair and the subsequent development
of a distinct
British Muslim identity. "Muslim identity
rocketed off with one
controversy after another, post-Rushdie,"
says Modood. "It became
very difficult to develop an Asian identity which
included other
faiths."
According to Roger Ballard, director of the Centre
for Applied South
Asian Studies at Manchester University, this polarisation
on
religious grounds, particularly between Muslims
and non-Muslims, is
growing. He thinks that young Asians don't hang
out together as much
as they used to, especially at university. "They've
been educated in
barmy notions of political identity," he
says. Where the immigrant
generation saw a common tie to south Asia, these
young Britons focus
on religious differences, and often get their
information from
extremist sources. "They have no access to
their history, no
appreciation of their culture, so instead they
embrace a very crude
form of identity politics."
Ballard believes that this is as true of young
Sikhs and Hindus as it
is of Muslims. For example, he is concerned by
how the ultra-
nationalist VHP (World Hindu Council) is exploiting
the London
bombings to gain support, particularly among young
Gujaratis. "Its
line is, 'We Hindus are entirely different from
Muslims. We've been
victims of terrorism by Muslims and we stand shoulder
to shoulder
with the Brits.'"
According to Jagtar Singh of the Sikh Federation,
there are a number
of towns and cities in the UK with tensions between
Sikhs and
Muslims, "especially among the youngsters.".
He mentions Birmingham
and west London; others mention Leicester, Slough
and Derby. The
scale of the conflict is difficult to quantify,
but Gurharpal Singh,
professor of interreligious relations at the University
of
Birmingham, says that it is a real problem. Professor
Singh believes
that the main cause of these tensions is a rise
in the numbers of
Muslims in areas that have traditionally had large
Sikh and Hindu
populations. However, he says, other factors -
including events in
India and concerns about the activities of radical
Muslim groups -
play a part.
There are non-Muslim Asians prepared to stand
shoulder to shoulder
with the Muslim community in its time of need.
"Most people I know
are proud to be British Asians," says Amar
Singh, editor of the multi-
faith Eastern Eye. He believes that "if anything,
the backlash
against the Asian community since 7/7 has reinforced
the idea of a
collective British Asian identity".
But I hear a different story time and time again
from Sikhs and
Hindus across the country. Mahendra Dabhi describes
an event he held
recently for sixth-formers in Birmingham: their
main concern was to
establish a Hindu identity before going to university.
"They felt
that if they didn't differentiate themselves,
they would be at risk
of social stigma. They wanted to say, 'We are
Hindus, we are not with
them [Muslims]. We play cricket with them and
we mix together fine,
but we are different.' "
The author is writing under a pseudonym. Some
other names in the
article have also been changed.
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