The Proverbs of Forgiveness
by
Bachchoo
My cousin Niloufer Patel received through her letterbox an appeal from Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral election this May. Mr Goldsmith is a London MP, the son of late Sir James Goldsmith and the brother of Jemima Goldsmith, sometime wife of Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricketer.
Six or seven other candidates have joined the contest, one of them a self-regarding, narcissistic socialist and the other a rich prince of Polish extraction, there is no electoral parallel to the Bernie Sanders-Donald Trump intrusions. The only real opposition to Mr Goldsmith is from the Labour nominee, Sadiq Khan.
Mr Khan is the son of a Pakistani immigrant who was a bus driver. He is a human rights lawyer by trade and the MP for the South London constituency of Tooting. The dirty tricks of the campaign have turned up the fact, publicised by the Zac-leaning Tory press, that his brother-in-law was associated with a banned Muslim radical organisation. The negative publicity hoped that some of the mud would rub off.
It doesn’t seem to have, but the ethnicity and religious adherence of Mr Khan are bound to be a factor in the coming election. Not only the fact that Mr Khan is a Muslim, but that with more than 30 per cent of Londoners being of immigrant stock, ethnicity and the subcontinental religious allegiances will play a significant part.
The electoral pamphlet my cousin received from Mr Goldsmith was rather strange. It targeted everybody called Patel, because someone in Mr Goldsmith’s campaign team must have told him that all Patels are Gujaratis. My cousin Niloufer and her husband are Parsis and share the fairly common surname with Hindus as their ancestors were rooted in Gujarat.
Mr Goldsmith’s pamphlet implied that if Mr Khan, a socialist, won the election, he would tax the Gujarati jewellery businesses. I don’t know how many Patels own or avail of jewellery businesses but I deduce the sub-text of the message, something that Mr Goldsmith dare not say outright, which is: “If you are a Hindu, don’t vote for a Muslim.” The Patels are not the only ethnic community that Mr Goldsmith has targeted. His team sent out an electoral pamphlet to everyone in the telephone directory (or on some Internet London address site) called Singh. His advisers on the campaign team also believe that everyone with the surname Singh has to be a Sikh. The pamphlet boasted that Mr Goldsmith had, in his capacity as MP campaigned against United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation nominating the Golden Temple in Amritsar as a world heritage site. He said he was fighting for the Sikh community to retain control over the site.
But that’s not all. The Singhs of London were told that Mr Goldsmith campaigned to make public all the documents in the UK’s possession pertaining to the Indira Gandhi’s government’s assault on Bhindranwale’s group in the Golden Temple. Of course it was not only on his reputation as a historical Singh-supporter that Mr Goldsmith was making his appeal. He promised to open up County Hall to Baisakhi celebrations after he becomes mayor.
Targeting people surnamed Singh was something of a boo-boo. Hindus with the common Rajput and Uttar Pradesh name of Singh responded when they received this crass electoral appeal, noting that the sub-text of Mr Goldsmith’s appeal was that Mr Khan — the-Muslim “Pakistani” could not be trusted to look after their religious and ceremonial interests.
I don’t suppose Mr Goldsmith will send a campaign circular out to everyone called Dhondy in London. There are only a handful, if that, of us and so not an alluring electoral target. And I am sure he can’t boast that he opposed the invasion of the Achaemenid Persian empire by the Macedonian bandit Alexander in the 4th century BC. He might of course allude to the defeat of the Parsi Zoroastrian empire of Yazdegerd III in 641 AD by the Muslims and attempt, in the sub-text to get us Dhondys to vote against Mr Khan who is after all a Muslim.
Mr Goldsmith’s campaign tactic is quite pernicious. Mr Khan is, as a representative of Labour, a secular candidate. The Singhs and Patels, whether they be Sikh or Hindu should, and I think will, acknowledge that he is a genuine representative of the ethnic minorities of Britain. He is a meritocrat who knows first-hand what the struggle to succeed of the poorer sections of London entails. And if the poor are always with us, in the forthcoming mayoral elections the poor, however much in denial of their status, are the majority of the population.
London faces crises in housing, education, transport, the cost of living, policing, terrorism, infrastructure and the huge problem of Russian oligarchs, Arab do-nothing billionaires, South Asians with black and laundered money and others buying up the richest housing stock as a tax-dodge and an “untraceable” investment.
Mr Godsmith the Tory won’t, on the evidence of his party’s governmental record, be able to do much about any of the former and will certainly be prevented by the Central government powers from touching the protected status of this Russo-Arab-Asian stock of property speculators.
Mr Khan, backed by the present Labour Party, now in Opposition, would have to find a way around all of these issues. Already his manifestos and speeches indicate, admittedly without very many specific avenues being charted, that he will tackle them all.
I don’t think Mr, Mrs and Ms Singh or Mr, Mrs and Ms Patel will fall for the tax on jewellery ruse or give much credence to Mr Goldsmith’s attempt to deny the Sikhs a world heritage site. As for Baisakhi celebrations, the Singhs are quite happy, as I have witnessed over the years, celebrating the festival by paralysing the streets of Southall. Offering them County Hall is like asking Catholics to celebrate Christmas in the Pentagon rather than in St. Peter’s Square.
