Why identitarians can’t handle the Hindus

‘How did British Indians become so prominent in the Conservative Party?’, asked Neha Shah in the Guardian. It is a question many on the identitarian left like to ask. It is based on the assumption that something serious has gone wrong when 15 per cent of the cabinet of the ‘racist’ Tory Party is made up of an ethnic-minority group. It also assumes that there must therefore be something a little suspect about said ethnic-minority group.

According to this identitarian worldview, the British Indian community is refusing to act as it should. It is refusing to play the role assigned to it by the authors of the victim narrative of multiculturalism. So the likes of Shah, and other identity entrepreneurs, cast Hindus, like home secretary Priti Patel, in a new role — that of the race traitor.

Shah makes little attempt to distinguish between different sections and groups within the British Indian community. Instead, through a tendentious analysis of the role of East Asian Indians in the colonisation of East Africa during the late 19th and early 20th century, she portrays them as the craven patsies of British imperialism. Shah even calls Indians in Africa a ‘subordinate ruling class’, willing to take unfair advantage of their power to dispossess the African population of their resources and wealth. Here, Shah unwittingly echoes the vicious invective hurled at East Asian Indians by cynical African politicians, such as the Ugandan president Idi Amin, who demonised Indians in order to justify their brutal expropriation.

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