Indo-Pak diaspora & baggage of hate

Just before the 2015 World Cup, a match among immigrants from India and Pakistan caused minor trouble in Adelaide. Vivek Sharma from Panchkula, running a restaurant in Adelaide, was upset with the way a Delhi newspaper portrayed it as a bitter fight between proxies of India and Pakistan. The match was organised as a prelude to the India-Pakistan match to be held later in the same city, and it figured teams of Indians and Pakistanis against each other. The ‘fight’ actually was just a small flare-up during a match among friends and it was resolved immediately, Sharma said. “These Pakistani friends are the first people who would come to my help any time I need it,” he said.

This, I figured, was the camaraderie of the recent immigrant, speaking a language that’s easily understood by the other, enjoying the same food, listening to the same music and watching the same movies. What would happen if, over the years, they have a high number of their ‘own’ people, from their own countries, in the city? Isn’t it likely that they would then get corralled into their own little Indias and Pakistans — united by language, customs, ties of marriage and, most significantly, religion? Well, this seems to have happened in Great Britain.

Fifty-three years ago, a football match sparked off a war — la guerra del futbol, or Football War, took place in 1969 after El Salvador beat Honduras 3-2 in a qualifying match for the 1970 World Cup. Football itself wasn’t the reason the two football-drunk South American nations went to war — tensions between them had been building up for years over illegal immigration and ethnonationalism, and the match acted as the spark to the powder keg.

Cricket, mercifully, won’t cause war among South Asia’s cousin nations, four of which are crazy about the sport. But it is causing trouble in Great Britain, the colonial power that carefully stoked fires of ancient discord that simmered in this overpopulated, bewilderingly diverse region.

After India’s win over Pakistan in a group stage match of the Asia Cup on August 28, there were ‘disturbances’ in Leicester, the most ‘Asian’ of all British cities, with 37.13 per cent people calling themselves Asian or British Asian in the 2011 census — in which ‘only’ 51 per cent people identified themselves as ‘White’. Almost inevitably, with Pakistan carved out of India over religion, places of worship drew protesters or rioters, and it became a Muslim-Hindu conflict.

Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe said she had been told by her constituents that ‘tensions in the community may be more long-standing and not narrowly related to the India vs Pakistan’ match, pre-dating that flashpoint by ‘several months’, and talked about ‘incitement to hate targeting at those of Muslim or Hindu faith’.

She is right, because it’s clear that immigrants from South Asia have carried with themselves a huge legacy of religious and ethnic hatred and distrust to the UK. Indeed, this was inevitable. In 1948, the UK faced an acute shortage of manpower needed to rebuild the country after the devastation of World War II — they needed men to run the factories, work at construction sites, drive buses and man the National Health Service, created the same year. This is the reason men from the former colonies — or those yet to be freed — were invited over to the UK. India and Pakistan, having gone through a bloody, polarising separation, provided many of these men. They, and the migrants from the West Indian island nations, faced terrible racism in the early days. This hostility was one of the factors that prevented assimilation, forcing the immigrants to live among their own kind, reinforcing ties of faith and kinship — such pre-modern ideas lead to distrust of the ‘other’.

The tensions seem to have moved up to Smethwick, an industrial town near Birmingham. Last Tuesday, ‘hundreds of people’ organised a protest outside a temple in Smethwick. Police said there was ‘minor disorder’ during the protest, but ‘no outbreak of serious violence’. ‘We had a pre-planned police presence near the temple in Spon Lane where fireworks and missiles were thrown towards some of our officers. Thankfully, no one was injured,’ a police statement said.

The colonial decision of dividing India on religious lines has caused bloodshed and misery in South Asia over the last 75 years. Now the chickens have come home — to the UK — to roost. How will Britain handle religious separatism, which it fostered in South Asia, now that it’s budding on its own territory?

Go well, Federer!

Numbers are the only acceptable metric to judge superiority in sport. In cricket, the team that scores 200 runs is the winner against a team that scores 199; in tennis, a player who wins six games against four by the opponent wins the set, and a player who wins three sets against two by the opponent is the winner of the match. Sure, there are sports in which aesthetics is paramount — gymnastics or diving or equestrian, for example; but in these sports, too, perfection and aesthetics are judged by points awarded by referees.

This brings us to tennis. Roger Federer has won 20 Grand Slams, the toughest tournaments in tennis, the pinnacle of the sport; Rafael Nadal has won 22, Novak Djokovic has 21. Since 22 > 21 > 20, Nadal > Djokovic > Federer, right? Well, not necessarily. For those who actually play the game — rather than fans who have never touched the racquet — Federer is the supreme tennis player, for his creativity, his attacking game, his graceful and easy movement on the court. Casper Ruud says ‘he has played shots no one ever knew existed in tennis’. As John McEnroe says, you can argue about who is the greatest, but ‘for me, Roger is the most beautiful player to ever grace the court’. ‘Perfection in the tennis court’ is how Nadal describes Federer. If that were not enough, ‘he’s really as nice as he appears’, as McEnroe says. Goodbye, Roger Federer, the brightest star of tennis — the brightest star of all in sport, in fact.