Author: Rashmee Z. Ahmed
Publication: The Times of India
- Internet Edition
Date: February 20, 2002
URL: http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1579940&sType=1
The great sub-continental divide
is alive and well, 7,000 miles away from India and Pakistan as Britain
digests the news that people like 12-year-old ethnic Indian Abhay Patel
and his Pakistani classmate Ahmed Rasul will grow up to be painfully different.
According to a new government study,
boys like Patel are more likely to be white-collar workers and pillars
of British society. For Rasul, the future may be bleak and in the dole
queue.
The Patel-Rasul question is likely
to become Britain's biggest policy headache in the next decade, even as
Britain shivers with shame at the fact that three British Pakistanis are
interned by the US as fanatical al-Qaeda prisoners in Camp X-Ray and there
is rising evidence of economic and social deprivation among British Bangladeshis
and Pakistanis.
The study, commissioned by Prime
Minister Tony Blair, is stark about the impact of ethnicity, religion and
class on life, livelihoods and living standards.
It says that Britain's Pakistani
Muslims are three times more likely to be jobless than Hindus.
Indian Muslims do better than those
from Pakistan or Bangladesh. But Indian Muslims, it says, are twice as
likely to be unemployed as Indian Hindus.
Bangladeshi men are more likely
to find jobs as cooks. And one in 20 Indian men is a doctor, a ratio 10
times higher than for white men.
So how confusing is this in the
case of Patel and Rasul, two friends, who look like brothers from south-east
London and speak a bit of so-called chutney Hindustani for fun, though
their language of choice is English?
Sociologists say there is no contest
at all. Patel is from an environment that pushes him to succeed. If Rasul
does well, they say, it would be inspite of his circumstances.
Patel's mother teaches at a school
and his father works in a bank. His older sister is a lawyer and he goes
home to India just once a year.
Rasul's father owns a small business.
His mother stays at home, looking after the five children. The family often
have visitors to stay from Pakistan and they spend extended holidays there
themselves, forcing the children to miss weeks of school.
The gap between the two families
is one of aspiration, say sociologists, and this is why the report finds
the average Indian Hindu three times more likely to prosper than his Muslim
counterpart from Pakistan.
The study appears to be uncompromising
about the role of religion, warning that "the odds of being unemployed
do vary with religion", but it also finds racism to be a huge drawback.
The colour bar is the one point
at which Patel and Rasul remain equally disadvantaged, which may be small
consolation for Britain's South Asian community of mainly one-million Indians
and 700,000 Pakistanis.
