Author: Rashmee Z Ahmed
Publication: The Times of India
Date: June 17, 2002
The majority of Britain's 1.8 million
Muslims, who are of mainly Mirpuri and Pakistani origin, have voted with
their feet on Kashmir, saying it dominates their concerns and they are
fearful of a nuclear war erupting from the dispute.
In a newspaper survey that is being
described as the first major post-September 11 poll of British Muslim opinion,
the section of community officially listed as Pakistani, unsurprisingly
supported the Pakistani or separatist Kashmiri position.
Leading Kashmiri activists, however,
contested the Pakistani tag, saying the Mirpuri community accounts for
at least half the 700,000 British "Pakistanis".
Monday's Guardian newspaper survey
of "Muslim Britain" found that community opinion was evenly divided at
34 per cent each in support of "Pakistan or Kashmir". A minuscule two per
cent said they supported India on Kashmir.
Analysts said the poll was an important
indicator of the domestic pressure on leading British politicians to articulate
their constituents' opinion on controversial South Asian issues.
The poll recorded "the world's biggest
expatriate Kashmiri population in Birmingham" in north-west England.
Birmingham, whose local politics
is now almost totally dominated by Kashmir, has four local councillors
belonging to The People's Justice Party (Justice for Kashmir).
A leading Birmingham Mirpuri politician
told this paper that the opinion poll would probably go a long way towards
convincing mainstream British leaders of the need to hammer away at "India's
resistance to international engagement and mediation".
In a hard-hitting statement last
week to the British Parliament, foreign secretary Jack Straw had said Kashmir
was a bilateral issue, but of international concern because of the nuclear
implications and human rights deficit.
Monday's survey found that British
Muslims were more concerned about Kashmir or Afghanistan than about domestic
issues.
In significant recent comments,
Joe Ahmed-Dobson, a white Muslim convert whose father Frank formerly held
the health portfolio in Tony Blair's cabinet, warned of British Muslim
disaffection with the state over "the government's deafening silence over
the mass killings of Muslims in India ...."
Analysts pointed out that domestic
Muslim and Gujarati pressure had prodded Blair's government into a high-profile
stance on Gujarat.
Nearly half of Britain's 6.5 per
cent ethnic minority population is Muslim.
Muslims are thought to be a potentially
decisive political force in nearly 100 constituencies across the UK.
The opinion poll, which the newspaper
said kicked off a whole week of reporting on the politics and pop culture
of Muslim Britain, is supplemented by an editorial calling for continuing
international engagement on Kashmir and for "Delhi (to) accept that Kashmir
is an issue of international concern requiring formal international engagement
(and) an Oslo-style peace process.".
The survey, which also drew up a
geographical, health and economic map of 'Muslim Britain', found that more
than double the number of Pakistanis are diagnosed with chest pains or
heart disease than Hindus.
It said that many more Muslims report
a long-standing illness than Hindus or Sikhs.
