Sikhing the Truth
Problems in the South Asian community are not limited to Mirpuris
Although substantial immigration did not begin until after the Second World War, Britain has a multi-century association with South Asia, stretching back through the days of the British Raj and the East India Company to the first outpost of British control in Madras almost four hundred years ago. Inevitably, interaction with a foreign people requires some attempt to make sense of their nature and habits, and there have indeed been various British attempts over the years to classify and understand the different races and ethnicities of the subcontinent. From the ‘martial races’ theory proposed by British officials in the nineteenth century (and codified in the Punjab Land Alienation Act 1900) to the various commentaries we see today from amateur (and often politically motivated) anthropologists on the internet and in the media, the impulse to disaggregate South Asia’s varied populations has always been strong.
Often, these attempts leave much to be desired. Commentators will often seek to split hairs, and groups that are racially identical or near enough are often assigned wildly different characteristics based upon the political expediencies of the person making the point. Now, with many of these groups to be found in large numbers in Britain, it is worth reassessing our understanding of their similarities and differences and updating our assumptions. The aim of this article is not to suggest any particular action, nor to paint any ethnic or religious group as universally problematic — it is to promote a clearer understanding of how we should understand different communities and how they relate to the country as a whole, based in part on my own experiences amongst South Asians in Britain.
At least until very recently, no two groups of South Asians in Britain were defined by more divergent perceptions — especially on the right — than Sikhs and Mirpuris. Whilst the former has often been valorised, especially in the context of ostensibly shared concerns over Islam (an idea promoted by, of all people, Tommy Robinson), the latter has correctly been identified as a particularly dysfunctional group.
The term Mirpuri is a demonym — it does not describe a specific race, ethnicity or caste. Mirpuris, who make up around three-quarters of Pakistanis in Britain, are ethnic Punjabis found in the border town of Mirpur (which is merely several miles outside of the Punjab and inside the territory of Azad Kashmir) and its surrounding regions. Most modern-day Mirpuris migrated to the region in the eighteenth century. It is correct to note that Mirpuris are unusually clannish, that they have high rates of cousin marriage, that they have lower educational attainment and employment rates, and that they were involved in the grooming of English children. However, this does not dissolve the responsibility of anthropologists to be thorough in their analysis. Those hailing from the town of Mirpur are predominantly from two tribal origins — primarily the Jatts (also spelt ‘Jat’ and ‘Jaat’), and secondarily the Rajputs. Both groups were historically classified as ‘martial races’ by the British, connoting physical strength and intellectual weakness, and as a result were heavily recruited into what was then the British Indian Army. Much as this classification may have been crude and unscientific, the fact that generalised perceptions of these groups have remained stable over time should be noted.
What is interesting (and potentially misleading) is the insistence on separating the Mirpuri from his cousins across the broader Punjab — whether on the Pakistani side of the border or the Indian. Sikhs provide an excellent case study here. Seventy per cent of Sikhs are Jatts, and Mirpur was home to ten thousand Sikhs before independence. It is also worth noting that Mirpur, or the wider region of Azad Kashmir, is not underdeveloped by Pakistani standards — it in fact scores second of all Pakistani provinces by HDI. If you were to perform a DNA test on a Jatt Sikh and a Mirpuri Muslim, you would find no genetic difference. The two groups have no linguistic differences either — both speak Punjabi and can communicate without the need for a subcontinental lingua franca such as Urdu or Hindi. In fact, Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was born a mere 250 kilometres from Mirpur, in a time when the Jatts were still more broadly distributed across the Punjab. If the Guru were resurrected from the dead, he would be able to order a meal from the markets of Mirpur with ease. Therefore, we must ask, what is the meaningful difference between a Mirpuri and a Sikh?
The historic answer to this question has been that Sikhs and Mirpuris are divided by different perceptions of and relationships to Britain, with Sikhs commonly understood to feel great love for and connection to their host country (often thought to be a result of the close military relationship between the British and Sikh soldiers) and to have ‘integrated’ well into British life where Mirpuris have not.
The murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Singh Digwa, a Sikh — utilising a religiously mandated blade, no less — has shone a light on the facility of this analysis. The attempt by Digwa and his brother to abuse the accusation of racism to obscure their crimes is eerily reminiscent of similar attempts by grooming gang perpetrators across the country. Equally, the behaviour of Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, in taking the blade back to the family home to hide evidence, and of his father in physically detaining a wounded Nowak until the police arrived, rhymes with these past atrocities. This kind of familial loyalty was exactly the basis on which the grooming gangs operated, with cousins, siblings, and parents of the perpetrators either looking away, making excuses, or actively participating in the crimes against victims from outside of their community. A member of an inwardly-focused clan will always have a commitment and an incentive to protect their own at the expense of outsiders.
It is also clear that ‘integration’, or what we often perceive to be ‘integration’, by members of these clan structures can still prove inadequate to dissuade this kind of behaviour. Digwa’s family moved to the United Kingdom in the 1940s. His father was born in Southampton and worked a white-collar office job. His brother worked for Starling Bank, and Digwa himself worked at an accountancy firm. These were not members of a segregated underclass, understandably alienated from a society of which they were not part. Yet involvement in professional, middle-class society did not translate to a watering down of previously held values and longstanding behaviours.
This same dynamic can be seen at the political level, with the involvement of Mirpuris in the electoral system in places such as Bradford or Birmingham. These communities are highly politically active and organised, both at the council and parliamentary levels. Historically, these groups operated within and through the Labour Party, which would typically nominate a man with strong baradari (clan) connections who would entreat local clan leaders to arrange several thousand votes by order for the candidate. Clan leaders are able to deliver votes simply by calling upon the heads of families (normally the oldest male), who control the support of all their relatives. This process is made even easier by the postal vote system, as it allows for non-English speakers (mainly women and the elderly) to participate without difficulty. All in all, a Labour candidate could, in times gone by, secure the support of an entire ward with no more than a handful of meetings and phone calls. Since the outbreak of war in Gaza, we have seen a number of independent candidates begin to tear away this support, but for all the pretence of someone like Akhmed Yakoob towards ‘ending baradari politics’, the underlying political methodology remains the same, even as the beneficiaries change. Political engagement is often listed as a key signifier of ‘integration’, yet these practices show not only that it is a poor indicator thereof, but that it can, in many cases, provide a platform for imported patterns of social organisation to reinforce themselves.
The right often desires a favourable ‘model minority’ group which can be pointed to to deflect accusations of racism. This is the fundamental reason for the constant references to the services of Sikhs to the British state. The most common example of this is the notion that Sikhs serve in the British armed forces at unusually high rates. Yet, across all three service branches, there are only 220 Sikhs in employment (0.16% of the military compared to 0.8% of the population) — in contrast to 1500 Hindus (1.1% and 1.6%) and 450 Muslims (0.33% and 6%). All three groups are underrepresented, with Muslims by far the most so, but Hindus join the military at nearly 3.5 times the rate of Sikhs. It may be suggested that it is the historic service of the Sikhs, especially in the Second World War, that justifies this outsized respect. Yet, again, there were 649,900 Hindu soldiers in the British Indian army in 1945, and 447,580 Muslims, compared to only 94,270 Sikhs. As in many other cases, the narrative of the model minority is more political expediency than based on historical fact.
As part of this desire to create an ideal minority, the British government has historically engaged in rank favouritism towards Sikhs. The Kirpan is, by all means, a deadly weapon, and is actually carried explicitly with the intent of use — the religious basis on which a Sikh carries his Kirpan is that the Guru Gobind Singh ordered his followers to carry a knife in order to fight injustice. We have heard from some politically disingenuous individuals that the murder weapon in the Digwa case was not a Kirpan, but instead a different weapon. This is not true. A Kirpan is any blade that a Sikh carries in order to fulfil the ‘5 Ks’. The Nihang order that Digwa belonged to actually issue larger blades. The Pesh-Kabz, a 21cm armour-piercing Indo-Persian dagger used by Digwa, is lawful for a Sikh to carry in the UK, and it is not uncommon for Sikhs of some orders whether here or in the Punjab to do so. The gurus of the Sikhs carried the exact same knife. The left can usually be relied upon to grant get-out-of-jail-free cards whenever possible, but the complicity of the right in this case is unique. It was two Conservative governments — first in 1988, and again in 2019 — that introduced religious exemptions to knife bans for Sikhs. Would the same people ever be okay with carving out an exception to the ban on polygamy for Muslims, and if not, what is the difference?
Ironically, this rose-tinted lens seems rather one-directional. The Sikh view of Britain, contrary to popular assumptions, has always been less than ideal. Longstanding Sikh friends present to me a dim view of the 1919 Amritsar massacre, an issue which retains enough emotional strength that it inspired a Sikh militant, Jaswant Singh Chail, to take a crossbow to Windsor Castle on Christmas Day 2021 in an attempt to murder Queen Elizabeth II. Many Sikhs view the British as being responsible for the defeat of their empire in India and the end of Sikh political independence. Objectively, this is true — the British annexed the Sikh Empire following the Anglo-Sikh War of 1849. Even now, the Sikh daily prayer includes the recitation ‘Raj Karega Khalsa’ (‘The Khalsa shall rule’) in reference to this defeat and its ostensibly inevitable reversal. The perceived betrayal of partition provides further fodder for resentment, with both Muslims and Hindus given states of their own whilst Sikhs were forced into minority status within the new India. Given all of this, it should not be surprising to find that Sikhs tend to lionise their own fighters who made significant contributions to opposing British rule in the subcontinent — there is a public photo of the Mayor of Derby, Ajit Singh Atwal, holding an assault rifle whilst posing in front of a portrait of Bhagat Singh (who was hung for killing a British soldier and bombing the Delhi assembly in 1929).
Britain is not the only country to have had serious issues stem from Sikh socio-political resentments. Canada has a more significant Sikh population, and has been forced to manage both the importation of foreign political disputes alongside the related phenomena of extremist organisations and organised crime for decades now. Individuals formerly involved in or with family links to the Sikh separatist Khalistan independence movements moved in some numbers to Canada in the years following Operation Blue Star and the high mark of insurgency during the 1980s and early 1990s. This was facilitated by Canadian family reunification policies in the 1976 Immigration Act. For it, Canada received its worst terror attack in the country’s history and the second-worst act of aviation terrorism after 9/11. In 1985, the Sikh militants from the Khalistani group Babbar Khalsa killed 329 people, mostly Canadians, in the Air India Flight 182 bombing. Canada has since had to disband branches of the International Sikh Youth Federation, which had links to terrorist activity.
Most Khalistan advocacy in Canada has not been terror-related, but it remains the case that this is a persistent sore for the state to manage. There is significant overlap with Punjabi-led organised crime in fundraising (via the drugs trade) for Khalistani militants. There are substantive allegations that the Indian state has also utilised criminal gangs inside Canada to bludgeon Khalistani activism — notably with the 2023 assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an alleged militant and Canadian citizen, possibly by another South Asian group, the Bishnoi Gang. Even before Justin Trudeau decided to open Canada’s borders, the country had already become a field for intra-South Asian ethnic conflict.
Dislike of the English is equally a phenomenon which, unfortunately, crosses religious lines within South Asian communities, often out of the belief that their group was more hard done by than others either during partition or under colonial rule, or, for the more ecumenical among them, due to the conviction that the British created divisions within the subcontinent through their ‘divide and rule’ approach. These beliefs can be a unifying factor for South Asians of different beliefs and ethnicities. The ringleader of the largest Mirpuri grooming gang ever convicted, in Huddersfield, was a Sikh by the name of Amere Singh Dhaliwal. Again, this demonstrates the challenge of separating the two groups, but our focus must be broader still than this. Many Pakistanis — and many Brits, seeking to retreat from the discomfort of criticising an entire country or culture — eagerly claim that it is solely Mirpuris who demonstrate problematic tendencies, and in particular that the grooming gangs were an entirely Mirpuri phenomenon (even if cross-religious within that community). This claim does not stand up to scrutiny — the ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang, Shabir Ahmed, was from the town of Gujrat in Pakistani Punjab. The Telford grooming gang was run by Anjum and Akhtar Dogar — ‘Dogar’ being a solely Punjabi caste, not found anywhere in Kashmir.
A less ambitious claim is that it is simply the broader rural regions of Northeast Pakistan that produce dysfunctional or criminal cultures, and that those from the upper-middle-class urban centres are less inherently problematic. One of the cities often mentioned in these positive tones is Lahore. It is worth noting that Lahore was the site of blood-curdling violence during partition, and was the site of mass sexual violence against women in particular. In fact, many multi-century-old brothels operate in the city to this day, with little to no supervision over the age of the girls within. A Lahori couple, Ilyas and Tallat Ashar, were found guilty of trafficking a ten-year-old girl into the UK and repeatedly raping her in 2013. Obviously, we cannot say that all Punjabis are guilty of these crimes, but this does constitute evidence that barbaric attitudes towards women are to be found amongst the British Asian population as a whole, including non-Mirpuri urban Pakistanis. One of Britain’s most prominent Asian rappers and pimps, Frenzo Harami, happens to be of Punjabi extraction — he released a song called ‘Chaabian Boyz’ which featured the lyrics ‘I got 20 white girls… laying on their backs for P’. Harami’s prostitution ring operated not just across Northern England, but as far south as London.
Further evidence of Pakistanis from what would be upper-middle-class circles in their home country behaving inappropriately would be Naheed Ejaz, the Labour Mayor of Bracknell Forest, who helped her 41-year-old son hide evidence relating to his rape of a 15-year-old girl. Ejaz hails from Lahore, and is the epitome of a ‘sophisticated’ Pakistani, having graduated from the country’s oldest university, the University of Punjab, Lahore, and subsequently receiving a Master’s from the University of Sargodha in 1983 — an impressive achievement given that only 1.2% of Pakistani women were in higher education in 1980. Even amongst what we would imagine to be the country’s liberal elite, shocking examples of moral corruption abound. If the number of people from this social class immigrating to Britain were higher, it is not implausible that we could see similar kinds of semi-organised criminality among them as we see amongst their lower-class cousins.
Of all South Asian groups in Britain, Hindus are probably the least physically antagonistic and violent. This does not mean that they are exempt from all forms of antisocial behaviour — especially the practice of in-group preference. A significant number of Hindus — at least pre-Boriswave — in the United Kingdom came proximally from East Africa, and have a strong middle class background. This group did well for themselves in Africa, and have continued to do well for themselves in Britain. This may well be a laudable trait — but it has in this country, just as it has in Canada and elsewhere, created a very effective lobby group for India itself. From Parliament to private business, we see Indians promoting the interests of their mother country and its descendants wherever possible. The phenomenon of Indianisation in companies following the appointment of Indian CEOs or managers is well documented, with some companies (including Apple) even witnessing discrimination on the basis of caste. As Indians have become a larger part of the Conservative Party coalition, many Conservative MPs have made their own gestures of solidarity with the Indian state.
This is not a crackpot conspiracy theory, in 2015, the general secretary of India’s ruling party was Ram Madhav, who said:
‘They can be India’s voice even while being loyal citizens in those countries. That is the long-term goal behind the diaspora diplomacy. It is like the way the Jewish community looks out for Israel’s interests in the United States.’
Also in 2015, Modi urged the diaspora to act as an ‘extension of foreign policy’. This seems to have been a multi-decade policy with broad political consensus, as in 2003, Yashwant Sinha, the External Affairs Minister of the then ruling Congress Party, said:
‘People of Indian origin are extremely important sources of support for the Indian government in the execution of it’s policies through the influence and respect they command in the countries in which they live.’
Lower down the economic scale, a visit to any KFC, McDonald’s, Greggs, supermarket, and even many pubs will show you that there is a hiring preference in favour of Indians. Whenever an Indian is given the ability to make a hiring decision, it typically results in them hiring another Indian, and often one of the same caste. There is recent statistical evidence which shows that since 2020, there have been 27 non-EU young workers hired for every one young British worker that has been hired. Anecdotally, one will hear reports from current students or recent graduates seeking part-time employment which suggest it is almost impossible to find given the degree of competition from recent immigrants, especially Indians, who are willing to work part-time and have no intention of moving on given their limited employment prospects. This phenomenon mirrors similar processes by which Indians have come to dominate certain sectors elsewhere, notably the Patel Motel Cartel.
It is worth noting that amongst all subcontinental groups, the Hindus have the strongest affinity to caste by far. There is a clear and explicit mandate for this in Hindu religious scriptures, with Manusmriti 4:135 saying: ‘Let him not associate closely with outcastes, chandalas, or those excluded from society.’ There are further passages such as Manusmriti 1:91 which state that: ‘The duty of a Shudra [the lowest caste] is to serve the other varnas faithfully.’ It might surprise those not from the subcontinent that, even here in the UK, there are Indian organisations that have caste-based membership — for example, there are numerous Brahmin-only societies. As there are significantly more educated Indians than Pakistanis, an Indian-only organisation that aims to protect the interests of the Indian community is far more detrimental to the middle-class, white-collar Brit than a Pakistani mosque in Bradford. Indians are to the middle classes what Pakistanis are to the working classes. We should therefore ask the question, if there is a group that aims to promote its interests over others, can we really say that it has integrated — merely because they wear a suit?
It is correct to say that organised street violence is rarer amongst most Hindus in Britain. However, recent immigrants from Gujarat are much more working class and, for lack of a better word, rougher. We have seen the fruits of this with the Leicester riots in 2022, where both the Indian and Pakistani communities engaged in rioting and clashes. The recent arrivals from India did not hesitate in using street power, and in many cases dominated the local areas with proactive demonstrations – this is not unusual to South Asia, where lower-class Hindus have often engaged in violent dissent – the Gujarat riots of 2002, in which then Chief Minister and now Prime Minister Narendra Modi was heavily implicated, killed over 2000 Muslims. Selective immigration has meant that British Indians are generally peaceful and middle-class: India as a whole, unsurprisingly, is not quite so. With continued lower-class immigration from India, we may see more of the kind of disorder normally carried out by poorer communities.
This piece has touched on various misconceptions regarding South Asians in Britain. What unites all of these errors is the attempt to draw distinctions where none really exist. Most of these communities have common origins, and therefore exhibit common problems, similarly strong in-group preference, and equally hostile attitudes towards Britain and its indigenous population. Where differences seem to appear, they are sometimes mirages, or are artefacts of selective migration pressures which no longer apply, especially with post-COVID flows. Whilst one can often fail in one’s analysis by refusing to recognise distinctions between populations, the reverse can confuse the picture just as much. This is especially true when political incentives, including on the right, create the desire to shift blame or suspicion entirely onto one specific part of a broader community.
Britain faces challenges across the breadth of the South Asian community which must be addressed, and — sometimes despite appearances — integration has largely failed across the board. That problem is not just a problem of Mirpuris, or Muslims, or Pakistanis: it is the expected consequence of mass migration from a subcontinent where deeply entrenched ways of life have persisted for thousands of years. We should not expect a few decades of cohabitation to change what hundreds of years of cultural, commercial, and political interaction could not.
This article was written by Sharjeel Ashraf, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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I found the article very illuminating so thank you.
Interesting article. I think, more than anything, we're now starting to see what has already appeared in the US and that is the degeneration of attitudes amongst later generation immigrants even those typically assumed to be "the good ones" (see: US-Korean/Chinese/Japanese).
There are a variety of theories for this but I think the simplest is that, subconsciously, they simply know they don't belong here. Wealth and some status can cover that up but, as Britain's standard of living falls for everyone, it'll only become more and more exposed.
When I went to school there was a large contingent of Kashmiris/Punjabis; Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. All of them looked forward to their long summer holiday back in the Punjab/Kashmir. A friend, a Sikh, opined to me once that coming back to Britain was "always depressing". They were all very much middle-class too.
My friend went on to Cambridge and became a doctor. Every bit an exemplar of immigration done right yet I always remember that conversation we had as teenagers. Opinions like that don't die easily.