Why British Hindus’ politics cannot be defined by religion
WRITER CLAIMS SUNAK'S RISE AS PRIME MINISTER IS LINKED TO EDUCATION, NOT FAITH
AN ARTICLE in ConservativeHome, a “right-wing blog which supports but is independent of the Conservative Party”, has looked at Tory links with Hindus, as a result of prime minister Rishi Sunak’s rise to power.
It concluded: “In Britain, class matters more than religion, and is closely related to schooling, which Hindus take with the utmost seriousness.”
The piece by journalist Andrew Gimson accepts that the Conservative party does hold appeal for many British Hindus, but warns it would be a mistake to think their politics can be defined by religion. Gimson poses the question: “What of the politics of Hindus in Britain? This subject has received little serious study.
“Pollsters have generally avoided it. Disaggregating Hindu voters from Jains, Sikhs, Catholics, Muslims and other faiths found among British Indians is difficult and expensive.”
“Hindus don’t all think the same, any more than Anglicans do. Enoch Powell has ceased to be much of a limiting factor for the Conservatives when trying to recruit Hindus, but some of them continue to find Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’ intensely annoying, for they consider themselves British, and support England at football, but the Indian cricket team,” Gimson said.
He also said: “A survey carried out for the Carnegie Endowment in the summer of 2021 did find some movement by British Hindus away from the Labour Party, but sometimes to the benefit of the Liberal Democrats rather than the Conservatives. Muslims and Sikhs were more inclined to remain loyal to Labour. It is possible that by fixing our eyes on religion, we have overlooked the importance of other factors for British Hinduism.”
He began by asking: “Did anyone foresee that in 2022 Britain would have a Hindu prime minister? As it happens, David Cameron predicted this development, in a general sort of way, when he declared in 2015: ‘It won’t be long before there is a British Indian prime minister in Downing Street.’
“He announced this to 60,000 British Indians who had gathered in Wembley Stadium to celebrate the visit to Britain of Narendra Modi, prime minister of India since 2014.”
Gimson added: “Only seven years later, Rishi Sunak has become Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, prompting the Editor of ConHome to commission a profile of Hinduism in Britain. In 1961 there were 30,000 Hindus in Britain. By the time of the 2011 census, that number had risen to 817,000, and by 2017 it was reckoned to have reached 1,021,000.
“In 2014, the year before he entered the Commons, Sunak became head of Policy
Exchange’s Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Research Unit, and with his deputy, Saratha Rajeswaran, wrote A Portrait of Modern Britain, a detailed study of Britain’s various BME groups.
“It reported that of Indian adult migrants to Britain, 48 per cent are Hindu, 21 per cent Sikh, ten per cent Catholic, seven per cent Sunni Muslim, and five per cent none of these.
“Almost half of all Hindus, 47 per cent, live in London, mainly in Harrow, Brent and Southall, with 10 per cent in the West Midlands and 10 per cent in the East Midlands, mainly Leicester, where many arrived in 1972 after being expelled from Uganda. But the overall geographic spread is much wider than these figures suggest, and wider also than for other ethnic minorities, as can be seen from A Survey of Hindu Buildings in England, carried out for Historic England by Professor Emma Tomalin and Dr Jasjit Singh.”
The survey found “12 Hindu temples in the North East, 20 in the North West, 29 in the South, 30 in the East Midlands, 32 in the West Midlands and 64 in London, making a total of 187. Scotland and Northern Ireland appear to have four temples each, Wales three.”
Of these edifices “the most famous is the temple in Neasden”.
Gimson reported: “After a visit in May to Harrow for ConHome, to look at why the Conservatives had with the longstanding and active participation of many British Indians (Jains and Sikhs as well as Hindus) wrested control of the council from Labour, I asked an opinion pollster to direct me towards some actual numbers, and he replied, ‘Everyone is afraid of this subject. It is emotive and difficult and complex. It has basically been ignored.’”
He added: “Conservatives like to tell a story of Hindus as natural Thatcherites, energetic, entrepreneurial, law-abiding, full of the drive to succeed and utterly determined that their children should get a good education.
“They possess a version of the ‘vigorous virtues’, identified in 1992 by Shirley Letwin in The Anatomy of Thatcherism as entailing a preference for the individual who is ‘upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against enemies’.
“All this is true, and was touched on by Cameron at Wembley in 2015, where he named Sunak, Alok Sharma, Suella Braverman, Shailesh Vara and Priti Patel as British Indians who have become Conservative MPs.
"But it is not the whole truth, and there is a trap here for the unwary Tory, which is to suppose that once one knows someone’s religion, one knows where their political loyalties lie.
“That way lies sectarianism, of the kind often seen over Kashmir (a subject in itself ), and also very worryingly in the Leicester riots in September, when Hindu and Muslim youths took to the streets, each claiming to be defending their community against attack from the other side, the trouble inflamed by false accusations peddled on social media, often by agitators from outside Leicester.”
Gimson pointed out: “The Overseas Friends of the BJP – Modi’s party – had claimed before the general election that they would remove various British Indian Labour MPs from parliament, and signally failed to do so.”
He recalled that Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, had remarked in a piece for ConHome just after the 2019 general election, that “the political pluralism of British Indian views” has been “much underestimated”.
He quoted Katwala: “Labour won 18 of the 20 seats with the highest number of Indian voters – and there will be seven Conservatives, seven Labour MPs and one Liberal Democrat MP with Indian heritage among the 65 ethnic minority MPs in the Commons.”
Gimson said: “The swings to the Conservatives in two seats with high numbers of Hindu voters, Harrow East and Leicester East, were a local more than a national phenomenon. Boastful claims by BJP supporters, reported in The Times of India, that by mobilising the British Indian vote they would swing up to 40 seats to the Conservatives proved to be nonsense.”
Gimson quoted Charles Moore’s comments in the Daily Telegraph the day after Sunak became Tory leader: “The choice of Rishi Sunak is a victory for diversity. It is an important breakthrough for the minority community of which he is a part, a minority, that for too long, has been looked down on by the Old Etonians who have traditionally dominated the Conservative Party. I refer, of course, to Wykehamists, as old boys of Winchester College are called.”
Gimson said: “Sunak is only the second Wykehamist to become prime minister, but the sixth to have served as chancellor of the Exchequer, and by enabling him to get what he himself has described as an ‘absolutely marvellous’ education at one of the great schools of England, his parents, a doctor and a pharmacist, made his rise to high office much more likely.”