‘It’s about the sort of politics we want to have in Britain’
POLITICIANS TRADE CLAIMS TO EXPLAIN VOTING PATTERNS IN THE RECENT LOCAL ELECTIONS
“I’ve not seen that under the current regime,” Khan said.
“I know there were concerns under Jeremy Corbyn, but Kier has respect for different religions, he’s been quite clear in working together with everybody.
“Listen, the Hindus you’re talking about are British, right?
“So, I think it’s possible to be a proud Brit, a proud Londoner, proud to be of Hindu faith and Indian origin and that would be consistent with voting Labour.”
The Tories say the shift in the IndianHindu vote from Labour to them has been years in the planning and delivery.
MP Bob Blackman won Harrow East for the Tories in 2010. He is fiercely proud to be the chair of the all-party parliamentary British Hindu group and co-chair of the Indo-British group. So, why are Hindus voting for his party? “It’s a combination of factors,” he told Eastern Eye. “First, it is the hard work that Conservative candidates, the whole team put in, not just in the election period, but over an extended period of time.
“You need to recognise that I won Harrow East in 2010, directly from Labour, and held it ever since.
“We work week-in, week-out, knocking on doors, talking to people, finding out what their concerns are.
“We now have 20 of the 23 seats in Harrow East as Conservative, and we are in a position where 12 of those are from the Hindu community.
“So, it demonstrates the success that we’ve had in connecting with people on a local level, but also on a broader, diverse level, because we’ve got people from all communities campaigning with us.
“I’ve been working with the community for 30 years, so it’s nothing new to me.
“What we’ve been able to do, obviously, is to build that trust.
“People trust those who not only talk to them at election times, but also actually get involved with the community on a wider scale.”
But other Labour politicians who live in Harrow see it another way.
The former chair of the London Assembly, Navin Shah, accused the Conservatives of being divisive.
“This is a very sad situation where Tories in Harrow have stirred up hatred against the Labour party quite wrongly,” he said.
“People like us who are proud members of the Labour party know what Kashmir means, how important it is.
“But to create the kind of hatred and division that they have created is despicable. I totally and utterly reject and deplore such division that they’ve created.”
Shah said he had spent 40 years working in and for the different communities which live in his borough.
That work was meant to heal divisions and not create them, he said.
“How much do Tories know about Kashmir and the sensitivities?” he asked.
“Do they know more than the Indian government or Pakistani government?
“Yes, there are human rights breaches, which there are, let’s look at those, but do not have this divisive propaganda.
“This is the same old colonial British divide and rule they are showing, and I will have none of that.
“Labour has successfully, under Kier Starmer, dealt with issues about antiSemitism, as you can see from the results in Barnet.
“Similarly, we’re working hard, and we will work even harder, to gain that respect and trust of the Indian community.
“But to accuse the Labour party of being anti-Indian is complete nonsense.”
During the last general election in 2019, Eastern Eye saw evidence of Indians on WhatsApp groups who said “true Hindus would not vote for Labour” because of the party’s position on Kashmir.
“It’s vile, absolutely vile, and they play into inciting hatred,” said the senior Labour insider. “It’s painting pictures of the Muslim community as violent terrorists, and then painting the Conservative party as the only bulwark against them.
“It’s not a matter of what can any one political party do, because this is being led by leaders, both of the Islamic and of the Hindu community in this country.
“They are stoking up hatred against each other. They are importing into the UK the politics of the Indian subcontinent, and they are doing it quite deliberately, to foster their own power base within the community to get political preferment on whichever side of the political divide they are on.”
They also stressed that playing one Asian community against another was not just limited to Labour and the Tories. Harrow, said the source, was a microcosm of what is happening nationally.
“I find that this is not an issue about the Tories winning Harrow, or us clawing seats back in Burnley or Bolton or the red wall. It goes way, way beyond that sort of petty local politics.
“It’s about the sort of politics that we want to have in this country.
“It’s about whether we want to have our politics infected by hatred. We really need to get together and build a politics where this can’t happen. And when it happens on our side, we call it out, whichever side we happen to be on.
“If a politician sees the potential for advantage by getting the support of a particular ethnic group, it’s one thing to appeal to that ethnic group. But it’s another thing to do so by vilifying somebody else.”