Our shameful treatment of Britain's Sikh saviours

By : Dean Nelson
Dean Nelson is the Telegraph Media Group's South Asia editor. He has been based in New Delhi for three years.

With the deployment of two turbaned guards at Buckingham Palace this week, Britain’s Sikh community had cause to feel a little more appreciated than they have been over the years. To say the honour was a little late - more than 150 years after their troops came to the rescue of besieged British officers in the Indian mutiny, more than 60 after thousands of Sikhs gave their lives in Europe to save Britain from Hitler’s Germany - would be an understatement.

But any sense of satisfaction that a neglected community had finally been given the recognition it had been denied for so long was quickly replaced by a deep sense of shame at the treatment meted out to a party of Sikhs whose coach caught fire on Tuesday. They were returning to their homes in Luton from a day out at the seaside when their double-decker bus burst into flames. They managed to get out with the help of an off-duty policeman seconds before it exploded and melted. As they stood terrified on the hard-shoulder, passing motorists not only failed to stop and help, but actually slowed down to hurl racist abuse at the victims. Several gave them the finger and shouted at them to bet back into the blazing coach.
I grew up with racism. I remember being shocked the first time I saw a West Indian boy at the end of my Nan’s garden in Stoke Newington. It was the late 1960s, I was around five, and had been drawn by the mesmerising sound of steel drums one Sunday morning. I could not believe my eyes, I stared, and was clocked in the head for my rudeness.


I remember helping the milkman deliver free milk to Bangladeshi immigrants in Stepney two or three years later as he complained about ‘these F***ing Pakis, always paying with ‘tokens,’ the last word said in a bad Indian accent and with a wobble of his head. In my own family, my parents were always polite and friendly to all, but when my Dad, then a London bus driver, brought home his West Indian conductor for tea in the late 1960s, my Mum feared what our docker neighbours in Poplar, east London, might think.

I remember when we were later slum-cleared to an estate in Essex, how our neighbours, who’d by then bought their council homes, had threatened another because he had sold his to a ‘wog.’ Then, despite being part of an exodus from slum housing, many used to say they were ‘getting away from the blacks’ who’d moved into London’s poorer areas in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Theirs was the racism of ignorance and fear: poor people who felt their way of life was threatened by the smell of unfamiliar food, the sudden gaudiness of painted houses in our grey world, and newcomers they feared would take their jobs by working for less.

It took around 30 years for racism to become something widely regarded as shameful in Britain. I think the Daily Mail’s campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence, the young black teenager murdered by fascist thugs in south-east London, was a landmark. My Mum was later mortified at how she had reacted to my Dad’s friend several decades earlier. Once-‘smelly’ Chicken Tikka Masala later replaced fish and chips or roast beef as our national dish, and today we’re all in love with Bollywood.

I don’t believe my racist neighbours of the 1970s would have passed by a coach party of terrified Sikhs without offering to help. For all their ignorance, they valued their own sense of themselves as being ‘decent people.’ I wonder how these motorway racists think of themselves? Here in Delhi today, the story of my ‘fellow’ countrymen’s treatment of these terrified Sikhs is all over the Indian newspapers, and I’m conscious that our hosts will regard me as somehow connected to these barbarians. As the Sikhs prepare to honour the off-duty policeman who did go to their rescue,I feel ashamed to be British.

it's source : with thanks : http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/deannelson/100005641/our-shameful-treatment-of-britains-sikh-saviours/

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