Sikhing the Truth

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At least until very recently, no two groups of South Asians in Britain were defined by more divergent perceptions — especially on the right — than Sikhs and Mirpuris. Whilst the former has often been valorised, especially in the context of ostensibly shared concerns over Islam (an idea promoted by, of all people, Tommy Robinson), the latter has correctly been identified as a particularly dysfunctional group.

The term Mirpuri is a demonym — it does not describe a specific race, ethnicity or caste. Mirpuris, who make up around three-quarters of Pakistanis in Britain, are ethnic Punjabis found in the border town of Mirpur (which is merely several miles outside of the Punjab and inside the territory of Azad Kashmir) and its surrounding regions. Most modern-day Mirpuris migrated to the region in the eighteenth century. It is correct to note that Mirpuris are unusually clannish, that they have high rates of cousin marriage, that they have lower educational attainment and employment rates, and that they were involved in the grooming of English children. However, this does not dissolve the responsibility of anthropologists to be thorough in their analysis. Those hailing from the town of Mirpur are predominantly from two tribal origins — primarily the Jatts (also spelt ‘Jat’ and ‘Jaat’), and secondarily the Rajputs. Both groups were historically classified as ‘martial races’ by the British, connoting physical strength and intellectual weakness, and as a result were heavily recruited into what was then the British Indian Army. Much as this classification may have been crude and unscientific, the fact that generalised perceptions of these groups have remained stable over time should be noted.

What is interesting (and potentially misleading) is the insistence on separating the Mirpuri from his cousins across the broader Punjab — whether on the Pakistani side of the border or the Indian. Sikhs provide an excellent case study here. Seventy per cent of Sikhs are Jatts, and Mirpur was home to ten thousand Sikhs before independence. It is also worth noting that Mirpur, or the wider region of Azad Kashmir, is not underdeveloped by Pakistani standards — it in fact scores second of all Pakistani provinces by HDI. If you were to perform a DNA test on a Jatt Sikh and a Mirpuri Muslim, you would find no genetic difference. The two groups have no linguistic differences either — both speak Punjabi and can communicate without the need for a subcontinental lingua franca such as Urdu or Hindi. In fact, Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was born a mere 250 kilometres from Mirpur, in a time when the Jatts were still more broadly distributed across the Punjab. If the Guru were resurrected from the dead, he would be able to order a meal from the markets of Mirpur with ease. Therefore, we must ask, what is the meaningful difference between a Mirpuri and a Sikh?

The historic answer to this question has been that Sikhs and Mirpuris are divided by different perceptions of and relationships to Britain, with Sikhs commonly understood to feel great love for and connection to their host country (often thought to be a result of the close military relationship between the British and Sikh soldiers) and to have ‘integrated’ well into British life where Mirpuris have not.

The murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Singh Digwa, a Sikh — utilising a religiously mandated blade, no less — has shone a light on the facility of this analysis. The attempt by Digwa and his brother to abuse the accusation of racism to obscure their crimes is eerily reminiscent of similar attempts by grooming gang perpetrators across the country. Equally, the behaviour of Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, in taking the blade back to the family home to hide evidence, and of his father in physically detaining a wounded Nowak until the police arrived, rhymes with these past atrocities. This kind of familial loyalty was exactly the basis on which the grooming gangs operated, with cousins, siblings, and parents of the perpetrators either looking away, making excuses, or actively participating in the crimes against victims from outside of their community. A member of an inwardly-focused clan will always have a commitment and an incentive to protect their own at the expense of outsiders.

It is also clear that ‘integration’, or what we often perceive to be ‘integration’, by members of these clan structures can still prove inadequate to dissuade this kind of behaviour. Digwa’s family moved to the United Kingdom in the 1940s. His father was born in Southampton and worked a white-collar office job. His brother worked for Starling Bank, and Digwa himself worked at an accountancy firm. These were not members of a segregated underclass, understandably alienated from a society of which they were not part. Yet involvement in professional, middle-class society did not translate to a watering down of previously held values and longstanding behaviours.

This same dynamic can be seen at the political level, with the involvement of Mirpuris in the electoral system in places such as Bradford or Birmingham. These communities are highly politically active and organised, both at the council and parliamentary levels. Historically, these groups operated within and through the Labour Party, which would typically nominate a man with strong baradari (clan) connections who would entreat local clan leaders to arrange several thousand votes by order for the candidate. Clan leaders are able to deliver votes simply by calling upon the heads of families (normally the oldest male), who control the support of all their relatives. This process is made even easier by the postal vote system, as it allows for non-English speakers (mainly women and the elderly) to participate without difficulty. All in all, a Labour candidate could, in times gone by, secure the support of an entire ward with no more than a handful of meetings and phone calls. Since the outbreak of war in Gaza, we have seen a number of independent candidates begin to tear away this support, but for all the pretence of someone like Akhmed Yakoob towards ‘ending baradari politics’, the underlying political methodology remains the same, even as the beneficiaries change. Political engagement is often listed as a key signifier of ‘integration’, yet these practices show not only that it is a poor indicator thereof, but that it can, in many cases, provide a platform for imported patterns of social organisation to reinforce themselves.

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As part of this desire to create an ideal minority, the British government has historically engaged in rank favouritism towards Sikhs. The Kirpan is, by all means, a deadly weapon, and is actually carried explicitly with the intent of use — the religious basis on which a Sikh carries his Kirpan is that the Guru Gobind Singh ordered his followers to carry a knife in order to fight injustice. We have heard from some politically disingenuous individuals that the murder weapon in the Digwa case was not a Kirpan, but instead a different weapon. This is not true. A Kirpan is any blade that a Sikh carries in order to fulfil the ‘5 Ks’. The Nihang order that Digwa belonged to actually issue larger blades. The Pesh-Kabz, a 21cm armour-piercing Indo-Persian dagger used by Digwa, is lawful for a Sikh to carry in the UK, and it is not uncommon for Sikhs of some orders whether here or in the Punjab to do so. The gurus of the Sikhs carried the exact same knife. The left can usually be relied upon to grant get-out-of-jail-free cards whenever possible, but the complicity of the right in this case is unique. It was two Conservative governments — first in 1988, and again in 2019 — that introduced religious exemptions to knife bans for Sikhs. Would the same people ever be okay with carving out an exception to the ban on polygamy for Muslims, and if not, what is the difference?

Ironically, this rose-tinted lens seems rather one-directional. The Sikh view of Britain, contrary to popular assumptions, has always been less than ideal. Longstanding Sikh friends present to me a dim view of the 1919 Amritsar massacre, an issue which retains enough emotional strength that it inspired a Sikh militant, Jaswant Singh Chail, to take a crossbow to Windsor Castle on Christmas Day 2021 in an attempt to murder Queen Elizabeth II. Many Sikhs view the British as being responsible for the defeat of their empire in India and the end of Sikh political independence. Objectively, this is true — the British annexed the Sikh Empire following the Anglo-Sikh War of 1849. Even now, the Sikh daily prayer includes the recitation ‘Raj Karega Khalsa’ (‘The Khalsa shall rule’) in reference to this defeat and its ostensibly inevitable reversal. The perceived betrayal of partition provides further fodder for resentment, with both Muslims and Hindus given states of their own whilst Sikhs were forced into minority status within the new India. Given all of this, it should not be surprising to find that Sikhs tend to lionise their own fighters who made significant contributions to opposing British rule in the subcontinent — there is a public photo of the Mayor of Derby, Ajit Singh Atwal, holding an assault rifle whilst posing in front of a portrait of Bhagat Singh (who was hung for killing a British soldier and bombing the Delhi assembly in 1929).

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A less ambitious claim is that it is simply the broader rural regions of Northeast Pakistan that produce dysfunctional or criminal cultures, and that those from the upper-middle-class urban centres are less inherently problematic. One of the cities often mentioned in these positive tones is Lahore. It is worth noting that Lahore was the site of blood-curdling violence during partition, and was the site of mass sexual violence against women in particular. In fact, many multi-century-old brothels operate in the city to this day, with little to no supervision over the age of the girls within. A Lahori couple, Ilyas and Tallat Ashar, were found guilty of trafficking a ten-year-old girl into the UK and repeatedly raping her in 2013. Obviously, we cannot say that all Punjabis are guilty of these crimes, but this does constitute evidence that barbaric attitudes towards women are to be found amongst the British Asian population as a whole, including non-Mirpuri urban Pakistanis. One of Britain’s most prominent Asian rappers and pimps, Frenzo Harami, happens to be of Punjabi extraction — he released a song called ‘Chaabian Boyz’ which featured the lyrics ‘I got 20 white girls… laying on their backs for P’. Harami’s prostitution ring operated not just across Northern England, but as far south as London.

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It is correct to say that organised street violence is rarer amongst most Hindus in Britain. However, recent immigrants from Gujarat are much more working class and, for lack of a better word, rougher. We have seen the fruits of this with the Leicester riots in 2022, where both the Indian and Pakistani communities engaged in rioting and clashes. The recent arrivals from India did not hesitate in using street power, and in many cases dominated the local areas with proactive demonstrations – this is not unusual to South Asia, where lower-class Hindus have often engaged in violent dissent – the Gujarat riots of 2002, in which then Chief Minister and now Prime Minister Narendra Modi was heavily implicated, killed over 2000 Muslims. Selective immigration has meant that British Indians are generally peaceful and middle-class: India as a whole, unsurprisingly, is not quite so. With continued lower-class immigration from India, we may see more of the kind of disorder normally carried out by poorer communities.

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