British PM David Cameron has taken a leaf from Indian PM Modi’s book, by indulging in Islamophobic and racial profiling for votes.
In the London Mayoral polls, Cameron has distributed a letter to Hindus, especially Gujarati Hindus, and Punjabi Sikhs, asking them to vote for the Tory candidate, suggesting that voting the Labour candidate Sadiq Khan would be wrong at a time when “we need to be keeping our streets safe from terrorist attacks”.
In the letter captioned “The Gujarati community makes London great”, Cameron writes: “Closer ties between the UK and India have been a priority for me as prime minister. I was pleased to join Zac (Zac Goldsmith, the Tory Mayoral candidate) and thousands of British Gujaratis in welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the UK last year.”
Remember, the bonhomie between the Sanghis and Tories in the UK in their shared attempt to deny caste discrimination and propagate Islamophobia, goes back a long way. In the Parliamentary elections, the Conservative Party candidate in Harrow East, a constituency with a large Indian community, campaigned specifically on a promise to ‘work with the Dharmic community’ (sic) to overturn legislation outlawing caste discrimination which was recently passed in Britain after a campaign by Dalit organisations. Leaflets issued by a Sangh Parivar group urged their supporters to vote Conservative to overturn the anti-caste legislation!
But some voters have exposed and snubbed Cameron’s latest attempt. Retired biochemist Barbara Patel wrote back to Cameron, calling him out for his “facile and inaccurate attempt at racial profiling”. She wrote: “You have made a number of assumptions based on my surname (Patel = Gujarat and Gujarat = Hindu) and have attempted to use these ethnically based assumptions to ‘scare’ me into voting for your candidate, Zac Goldsmith….I am not from Gujarat. I am not a Hindu, my husband’s family are lapsed Muslims. Above all, I have never been, nor ever would be, a Tory voter.” She added that “the most distasteful aspect” of Cameron’s letter was his “attempting to cause division between the London Hindu Indian community and its Muslim community, shame on you”.
