08-09-2006, 08:19 PM
From Today's Asian Age -
I am not sure where to put it, contains some interesting stuff.
Mirpur's British MP 8/9/2006 12:08:14 AM
- By Farrukh Dhondy
"Who is the one who has no needs?
Flowers that grow without their seeds?"
From The Suffering
Canticles of Bachchoo
As an elder of the Asian community, I am often asked, "Why do Muslims exert such an undue influence on British politics?" In the past, I always fancied that it had something to do with the amorous relationship between certain leading Englishmen and their specifically Muslim lovers â the influence of the mandarins, the likes of E.M. Forster who had a Muslim boyfriend, and T.E. Lawrence, he of Arabia, whose passions constructed seven pillars of wisdom.
Take Forsterâs dedication of his A Passage to India to Ross Syed Masood and the substance of the book in which Forsterâs hero finds the Hindu Professor Godbole remote and philosophical and the main character Doctor Aziz, warm blooded and a possible object of love.
I now realise that my speculations and guidance have been too literary, and, therefore, irredeemably faulty. The British politicians of today are by and large illiterate and know nothing of T.E. Lawrence or of E.M. Forster â or for that matter of John Maynard Keynes who also came to India looking for pliant boys â I have been unable to ascertain the persuasion to which his conquests belonged.
I raise the subject because, in the political debate and division raised by the current war between the Hezbollah and the Israeli state, Britain is deeply divided. The world knows that Tony Blair has joined George Bush in endorsing the Israelisâ right to self defence against unprovoked attacks from the Hezbollah underground army in Lebanon. He has joined in the UN effort towards calling for a multinational force to stop the fighting, but he is content with Bush, to give the Israeli armed forces enough time to try and wipe out the Hezbollahâs military capability.
It canât be done. Hezbollah is not a national army with regimental headquarters and air bases that can be bombed. The insurgencies of the world, not least that in Iraq, have proved that even a small determined and perhaps fanatically dedicated body of people, supported by the arms, infrastructure and money of states such as Syria and Iran, can suffer heavily one day and live to fight the next.
There is no military solution to the hydra of the Hezbollah.
It is this realisation, coupled with revulsion at the Israeli strategic stance of bombing vast swathes of Lebanon and causing the perhaps unintentional and collateral deaths of thousands of civilians, that has caused Blairâs own party to state, in public surveys and now in Cabinet, its opposition to his policies.
His chief critic is his former foreign secretary, Jack Straw. Straw was replaced as foreign secretary a few months ago in a changing of the guards, but he was not thrown out of the Cabinet. He is now the Leader of the House of Commons.
Straw is a typical Labour politician in so far as he rose to prominence and built support in the Party by starting early. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, if I remember right, he was a student politician at Leeds University and became the president of the National Studentsâ Union. This is, as other student political bodies around the world are, a mock understudy of real national politics and a launching pad for aspirant professional politicians of whichever party.
After being big fish in the mock pond, student leaders have to learn to swim as small but growing fish in the large and real one. Itâs a matter of cultivating the stamina to sit through a million boring meetings which debate local and national politics to no practical effect, until the day comes when you become the survivor who has outstayed the boredom and can offer yourself as candidate for the safe Labour seat to which you have selectively, or precociously, attached yourself. Thatâs democracy.
Strawâs constituency is Blackburn, a mill-to-mosque town of Lancashire. It was born and bred in the 19th century textile trade and in the middle of the 20th century, after the Second World War, recruited thousands of largely Mirpuri workers to service the shifts and jobs in the mills which the white population of Lancashire had spectacularly abandoned.
In the Eighties, the textiles that these mills produced came into competition with those from India, Pakistan, Czechoslovakia and later China. Mrs Thatcherâs government took the view that the industry was unviable and shouldnât be supported, and ensured a short term survival by imposing tariffs on imports or by subsidising the mills. They should be allowed to go out of business.
The virtual closing down of the Yorkshire and Lancashire textile mills left thousands of mill towns with large communities of unemployed South Asian immigrants, most of them Mirpuris, Bangladeshis and Pakistani Punjabis. The function of these communities had never been to "integrate" into British society. They had been "imported" â had indeed volunteered to be imported â as cheap labour and left to form their own enclosed, distinct and separate societies.
If they voted at all, they voted Labour.
Earlier this year, Condoleezza Rice invited the then foreign secretary of Britain, Jack Straw, to the United States and took him on a friendly tour of Birmingham, Alabama where she was born and brought up. Straw was effusive about the visit. Here was a secretary of state who had risen from the ranks of the Afro-American community against very many odds.
Did it remind him of his own constituency in Blackburn, Lancashire with its own substantial Muslim community? Perhaps. He made the mistake of inviting Dr Rice for a return visit and showed her round the mosques and ghettos. She was greeted by anti-war Muslim demonstrators. Was she impressed? Or did she return to Washington and tell President Bush that the British foreign secretary is dependent for his seat in Parliament on a constituency with enough Muslims in it to vote him out?
Nevertheless, soon after her visit Straw was removed as foreign secretary in a reshuffle. My speculation at the time was that Blair and Bush were about to get tough with Pakistan on the issue of training and fuelling resurgent Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan where British troops are deployed, and that a foreign secretary from Blackburn would not survive a severe change in British policy towards Pakistan.
Now, with Straw returning to his constituency every week and speaking to larger and larger gatherings of his Muslim constituents, it becomes clear that he feels compelled to represent their growing dismay at Israeli attacks against the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Poor Straw, far from being a parallel to Dr Rice, he is now buffeted into becoming MP for Mirpur at Westminster.
I am not sure where to put it, contains some interesting stuff.
Mirpur's British MP 8/9/2006 12:08:14 AM
- By Farrukh Dhondy
"Who is the one who has no needs?
Flowers that grow without their seeds?"
From The Suffering
Canticles of Bachchoo
As an elder of the Asian community, I am often asked, "Why do Muslims exert such an undue influence on British politics?" In the past, I always fancied that it had something to do with the amorous relationship between certain leading Englishmen and their specifically Muslim lovers â the influence of the mandarins, the likes of E.M. Forster who had a Muslim boyfriend, and T.E. Lawrence, he of Arabia, whose passions constructed seven pillars of wisdom.
Take Forsterâs dedication of his A Passage to India to Ross Syed Masood and the substance of the book in which Forsterâs hero finds the Hindu Professor Godbole remote and philosophical and the main character Doctor Aziz, warm blooded and a possible object of love.
I now realise that my speculations and guidance have been too literary, and, therefore, irredeemably faulty. The British politicians of today are by and large illiterate and know nothing of T.E. Lawrence or of E.M. Forster â or for that matter of John Maynard Keynes who also came to India looking for pliant boys â I have been unable to ascertain the persuasion to which his conquests belonged.
I raise the subject because, in the political debate and division raised by the current war between the Hezbollah and the Israeli state, Britain is deeply divided. The world knows that Tony Blair has joined George Bush in endorsing the Israelisâ right to self defence against unprovoked attacks from the Hezbollah underground army in Lebanon. He has joined in the UN effort towards calling for a multinational force to stop the fighting, but he is content with Bush, to give the Israeli armed forces enough time to try and wipe out the Hezbollahâs military capability.
It canât be done. Hezbollah is not a national army with regimental headquarters and air bases that can be bombed. The insurgencies of the world, not least that in Iraq, have proved that even a small determined and perhaps fanatically dedicated body of people, supported by the arms, infrastructure and money of states such as Syria and Iran, can suffer heavily one day and live to fight the next.
There is no military solution to the hydra of the Hezbollah.
It is this realisation, coupled with revulsion at the Israeli strategic stance of bombing vast swathes of Lebanon and causing the perhaps unintentional and collateral deaths of thousands of civilians, that has caused Blairâs own party to state, in public surveys and now in Cabinet, its opposition to his policies.
His chief critic is his former foreign secretary, Jack Straw. Straw was replaced as foreign secretary a few months ago in a changing of the guards, but he was not thrown out of the Cabinet. He is now the Leader of the House of Commons.
Straw is a typical Labour politician in so far as he rose to prominence and built support in the Party by starting early. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, if I remember right, he was a student politician at Leeds University and became the president of the National Studentsâ Union. This is, as other student political bodies around the world are, a mock understudy of real national politics and a launching pad for aspirant professional politicians of whichever party.
After being big fish in the mock pond, student leaders have to learn to swim as small but growing fish in the large and real one. Itâs a matter of cultivating the stamina to sit through a million boring meetings which debate local and national politics to no practical effect, until the day comes when you become the survivor who has outstayed the boredom and can offer yourself as candidate for the safe Labour seat to which you have selectively, or precociously, attached yourself. Thatâs democracy.
Strawâs constituency is Blackburn, a mill-to-mosque town of Lancashire. It was born and bred in the 19th century textile trade and in the middle of the 20th century, after the Second World War, recruited thousands of largely Mirpuri workers to service the shifts and jobs in the mills which the white population of Lancashire had spectacularly abandoned.
In the Eighties, the textiles that these mills produced came into competition with those from India, Pakistan, Czechoslovakia and later China. Mrs Thatcherâs government took the view that the industry was unviable and shouldnât be supported, and ensured a short term survival by imposing tariffs on imports or by subsidising the mills. They should be allowed to go out of business.
The virtual closing down of the Yorkshire and Lancashire textile mills left thousands of mill towns with large communities of unemployed South Asian immigrants, most of them Mirpuris, Bangladeshis and Pakistani Punjabis. The function of these communities had never been to "integrate" into British society. They had been "imported" â had indeed volunteered to be imported â as cheap labour and left to form their own enclosed, distinct and separate societies.
If they voted at all, they voted Labour.
Earlier this year, Condoleezza Rice invited the then foreign secretary of Britain, Jack Straw, to the United States and took him on a friendly tour of Birmingham, Alabama where she was born and brought up. Straw was effusive about the visit. Here was a secretary of state who had risen from the ranks of the Afro-American community against very many odds.
Did it remind him of his own constituency in Blackburn, Lancashire with its own substantial Muslim community? Perhaps. He made the mistake of inviting Dr Rice for a return visit and showed her round the mosques and ghettos. She was greeted by anti-war Muslim demonstrators. Was she impressed? Or did she return to Washington and tell President Bush that the British foreign secretary is dependent for his seat in Parliament on a constituency with enough Muslims in it to vote him out?
Nevertheless, soon after her visit Straw was removed as foreign secretary in a reshuffle. My speculation at the time was that Blair and Bush were about to get tough with Pakistan on the issue of training and fuelling resurgent Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan where British troops are deployed, and that a foreign secretary from Blackburn would not survive a severe change in British policy towards Pakistan.
Now, with Straw returning to his constituency every week and speaking to larger and larger gatherings of his Muslim constituents, it becomes clear that he feels compelled to represent their growing dismay at Israeli attacks against the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Poor Straw, far from being a parallel to Dr Rice, he is now buffeted into becoming MP for Mirpur at Westminster.