Will British Hindus sink UK’s Labour party after Leicester events and the rise of Sunak?

If the UK’s Labour Party had shocked its Hindus voters in the general elections in December 2019 over its Kashmir stand, the decision to deselect all of its six Hindu councillors this April from Leicester has completed the estrangement.

Two of the Hindu Labour councillors have joined the Conservative Party and plan to contest the elections while the other four, who also plan to contest, will do so independently. In all, this means a complete loss for Labour as it loses all its Hindu councillors from the riots-impacted Leicester city.

The UK goes to the polls on May 4 to select councillors across the country. The polls are being seen as a weathervane to the national elections of 2024.

The Labour Party’s purge of Hindu councillors will have a bearing on the fortunes of the Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby, who now finds that Conservative Party councillor Sanjay Modhwadia will contest the mayoral election against Rita Patel – ousted Labour Party councillor. The elections in May will spell out how deep the fissures are between the Labour and the Hindus, some of whom were driven out of Leicester by Islamist mobs.

If the Leicester decision of early April was not enough, recently the party went a step forward to further antagonise its Hindu voters.

Out of a series of advertisements against the Conservative Party, it also put up an ad saying that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak does not think that adults convicted of child sex assaults should go to prison. The controversial ad reads: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t”.

The advertisement has been panned across the political community. Ironically, it comes up exactly at the moment when the Sunak government ramped up its policies to fight Pakistani grooming gangs responsible for sexual exploitation of thousands of underage white girls.

For the Labour Party, both – the timing of the advertisement bad, and the taste poor.

Over a dozen prominent leaders from the Hindu and Sikh faiths have written a letter to Home Secretary Suella Braverman supporting her in her efforts to bring justice to the white girls who were exploited by criminals who got away scot-free due to racial sensitivities in British society.

The letter reads: “As UK faith representatives, we support the ongoing efforts of Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who, in the face of some considerable hostility, has courageously spoken out about the over-representation of British Pakistani men in sex grooming gangs operating around the UK. The evidence contained within a number of independent inquiries – Rotherham, Telford, and Rochdale support her position on what is indeed a sensitive and difficult matter”.

The letter says that “non-Muslim girls (this includes Sikh, Hindu, and White Christian girls) have been systematically targeted in Britain due to a form of religiously and racially motivated hatred”.

As the Hindu diaspora coalesces in the UK, people are now accusing the Labour Party of being Hinduphobic – an accusation if it sticks, will cause mass damage including desertions, to the party from its traditional Hindu support base.

Noted British Indian businessman, Kapil Dudakia has been highlighting for the past many years that the Labour Party is repeating a pattern of being anti-Hindu, anti-India and Hinduphobic.

Citing the example of Dr Subramanium Swamy from 2015, whose event was cancelled by the Oxford University, Dudakia says: “We have seen many examples of such racist and Hinduphobic behaviour at many of our leading universities. You will recall, Vivek Agnihotri was also cancelled by Oxford University in order to stop him from telling the truth about Kashmir”.

Pointing to other similar examples, he says that Indian student Rashmi Samant was harassed by the Oxford University Students Union and recently, Karan Kantaria was ejected from the LSE students’ union elections.

With issues ranging from the Leicester riots against the Hindus under the nose of Labour Mayor Soulsby, to grooming gang cases targeting girls from specific communities by Pakistani men, to LSE student Karan Kantaria’s ‘cancellation’ by the Left crowd, capped by an advertising campaign against Sunak that sounds malicious, British Hindus are beginning to rethink their relations with Labour.

The latest polls – Sunak has reduced the lead to its narrowest since becoming the Prime Minister in October – along with a fast-shrinking Hindu voter base should discomfit the Labour Party.

Also read: British Indians, Nepalese ecstatic as Rishi Sunak rises to the top in the UK