Author: Rashmee Z Ahmed
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 16, 2001
A controversial BBC report on Hindus
being driven out of the northern English city of Bradford by young Muslims
in an act the Vishwa Hindu Parishad provocatively describes as "ethnic
cleansing", has evoked sharp reactions all around.
Meanwhile, Britain's mainstream
election campaign continues to steer away from the Asian debate over the
religious divide, in a reminder of the chasm between race relations and
the political centreground.
There seems no middle ground as
Hindus and Muslims trade charges. Bradford's Muslims deny they are chasing
the Hindus away, while sections of the Hindu community acknowledge the
exodus was originally a matter of choice.
"We are almost like white people,"
Jiniah Parthasarthy of the VHP told The Times of India. "We have small
families, the woman works. But not Muslims. So, we are all leaving those
crowded Asian ghettos. Over the years it was our own free will. Now, some
Muslims are harassing us".
Parthasarthy, a former finance ministry
employee in Delhi, has worked in Bradford for nearly 40 years. He believes
the Hindus initially left the city to escape the dirt and over-crowding,
but now they want to escape the "Talibanisation of Bradford, the Khalifa
movement, more than 50 mosques, 100 madrassas".
He blames the air of menace on the
radicalisation of young Muslims by firebrand leaders such as Sheikh Omer
Bakri, whose Al Muhajiroun movement boasts that it trains potential jihadis
bound for Kashmir and Chechnya. Many believe that Bakri's quarterly excursions
from London down to Bradford stir up trouble of the sort discouraged by
the largely Pakistani organisation that runs Bradford's mosques.
But Pakistani community leaders
reject all suggestions of anti-Hindu sentiment in Bradford. Ishtiaq Ahmed
of the Council of Mosques, insists there is no "real" friction between
Hindus and Muslims, who still live and work side-by side. Mohammed Ajeeb,
a former mayor, who proudly testifies to protecting Hindu temples after
the Babri masjid was demolished, says the two communities are keen to avoid
re-creating India and Pakistan over here.
Even as police reject the VHP's
charge of "systematic ethnic cleansing of Hindus", there is some incredulity
among sociologists and political analysts about the use of highly charged
words, which provoke knee-jerk responses from a Europe that has been fighting
Balkan ethnic cleansing for a decade.
"Ethnic cleansing is a push-button
word," according to a peace studies expert at Bradford University. "It
doesn't exist in a developed western European country. Thank God for that".
Mainstream politics, meanwhile,
continues almost to ignore the whole issue. Campaigning in the largely
Pakistani northern city of Oldham, Prime Minister Tony Blair made no mention
on Tuesday of the angst of neighbouring Bradford's Hindus and Muslims.
Tuesday's BBC report comes just
six weeks after a bout of still largely unexplained trouble in Bradford,
which police later said was not racial. Even so, it variously pitted mixed
groups against whites and then Hindus, offering a confused picture of possible
class-led hostility.
