Did anyone foresee that in 2022 Britain would have a Hindu Prime Minister? As it happens, David Cameron predicted this development, in a general sort of way, when he declared in 2015: “It won’t be long before there is a British Indian Prime Minister in Downing Street.”
He announced this to 60,000 British Indians who had gathered in Wembley Stadium to celebrate the visit to Britain of Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India since 2014.
Cameron, who spoke for ten minutes as the warm-up act for Modi, assured the enthusiastically applauding crowd that
“the values you hold dear, family, responsibility, enterprise, hard work, these are the values our country needs more of,”
and in Hindi declaimed Modi’s election slogan, “Good days are coming”, which he proceeded to repeat with the addition of a single word: “Good days are definitely coming!”
Even Modi, standing just behind Cameron, could not forebear to smile. As for the speaker, he conveyed the pleasure an Englishman feels on having said a few words in a foreign language well enough to be understood.
Only seven years later, Rishi Sunak has become Britain’s first Hindu Prime Minister, prompting the Editor of ConHome to commission a profile of Hinduism in Britain.
In 1961 there were 30,000 Hindus in Britain. By the time of the 2011 census, that number had risen to 817,000, and by 2017 it was reckoned to have reached 1,021,000.
In 2014, the year before he entered the Commons, Sunak became head of Policy Exchange’s Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Research Unit, and with his deputy, Saratha Rajeswaran, wrote A Portrait of Modern Britain, a detailed study of Britain’s various BME groups.
It reported that of Indian adult migrants to Britain, 48 per cent are Hindu, 21 per cent Sikh, ten per cent Catholic, seven per cent Sunni Muslim, and five per cent none of these.
Almost half of all Hindus, 47 per cent, live in London, mainly in Harrow, Brent and Southall, with ten per cent in the West Midlands and ten per cent in the East Midlands, mainly Leicester, where many arrived in 1972 after being expelled from Uganda.
But the overall geographic spread is much wider than these figures suggest, and wider also than for other ethnic minorities, as can be seen from A Survey of Hindu Buildings in England, carried out for Historic England by Professor Emma Tomalin and Dr Jasjit Singh.
They found 12 Hindu temples in the North East, 20 in the North West, 29 in the South, 30 in the East Midlands, 32 in the West Midlands and 64 in London, making a total of 187. Scotland and Northern Ireland appear to have four temples each, Wales three.
Of these edifices the most famous is the temple in Neasden, illustrated at the top of this article, of which one guide relates:
“Regarded as Britain’s first authentic Hindu temple and the first traditional stone temple in Europe, the Neasden Temple is a beautiful, opulent place of worship found in the London Borough of Brent….
“The new mandir was built using entirely traditional methods; avoiding using modern materials such as steel and iron, it required almost 3,000 tonnes of Bulgarian limestone and 2,000 tonnes of Italian marble. More than 26,000 individually numbered pieces of stone for the main mandir building were sent to a team of 1,500 sculptors in Gujarat, who carved and prepared them, before shipping them back to London to be assembled.
“Likewise, a cultural centre adjacent to the mandir, known as the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Haveli, was constructed using English Oak and Burmese Teak sent to India to be fashioned into intricate and opulent beams, arches, and screens by a team of 150 traditional craftsmen.
“The construction of the site required the work of hundreds of volunteers, and was finally completed in 1995, at a cost of £12 million (raised wholly by the community).”
Politicians love to be photographed at this exotic building, which shows them being welcomed to, and at ease in, one of the symbols not only of Hindu pride and prosperity, but of the religious freedom which makes Britain an attractive place to adherents of every faith under the sun.
One is reminded of Edward Gibbon’s observation, in Chapter Two of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.”
We do not now regard all modes of worship as “equally true”, but we do try, while knowing almost nothing about most of them, to accord to them an equality of respect. Religion is treated as a private matter, to be followed however the believer wishes.
What of the politics of Hindus in Britain? This subject has received little serious study.
Pollsters have generally avoided it. Disaggregating Hindu voters from Jains, Sikhs, Catholics, Muslims and other faiths found among British Indians is difficult and expensive.
After a visit in May to Harrow for ConHome, to look at why the Conservatives had with the long-standing and active participation of many British Indians (Jains and Sikhs as well as Hindus) wrested control of the council from Labour, I asked an opinion pollster to direct me towards some actual numbers, and he replied:
“Everyone is afraid of this subject. It is emotive and difficult and complex. It has basically been ignored.”
Conservatives like to tell a story of Hindus as natural Thatcherites, energetic, entrepreneurial, law-abiding, full of the drive to succeed and utterly determined that their children should get a good education.
They possess a version of the “vigorous virtues”, identified in 1992 by Shirley Letwin in The Anatomy of Thatcherism as entailing a preference for the individual who is “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against enemies”.
All this is true, and was touched on by Cameron at Wembley in 2015, where he named Sunak, Alok Sharma, Suella Braverman, Shailesh Vara and Priti Patel as British Indians who have become Conservative MPs.
But it is not the whole truth, and there is a trap here for the unwary Tory, which is to suppose that once one knows someone’s religion one knows where their political loyalties lie.
That way lies sectarianism, of the kind often seen over Kashmir (a subject in itself), and also very worryingly in the Leicester riots in September, when Hindu and Muslim youths took to the streets, each claiming to be defending their community against attack from the other side, the trouble inflamed by false accusations peddled on social media, often by agitators from outside Leicester.
The Daily Telegraph reported last weekend that a Hindu activist, Rashmi Mishra, accused of being a “divisive” figure, was once more planning to stage protests in Leicester.
Dr Chris Allen, Associate Professor at Leicester University’s Centre for Hate Studies (which sounds like an invention by the late Michael Wharton, but actually exists), was asked by the Mayor of Leicester, Sir Peter Soulsby, to conduct an inquiry into the riots, but pulled out after local Hindu organisations said they would boycott him because of his work on Islamophobia.
Dr Allen said he was withdrawing because he felt he could not conduct the inquiry in an impartial way, rather than because of “the unprecedented levels of hate that has been directed towards me in recent weeks or the spurious allegations circulating on social media”.
A distinguished British Hindu to whom I spoke this week observed that before 2014 Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001-14, had no visa to travel to either the United Kingdom or the United States, “because of his complicity, looking the other way, during the Gujarat Pogrom of 2002“, in which 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus died.
This distinguished figure fears well-justified criticism of Modi will be dismissed as “Hinduphobia”, British politics will be contaminated by vicious anti-Muslim polarisation of the kind used by the BJP to win elections in India, and British negotiators, anxious to obtain a trade deal with India, will be far too indulgent towards Modi: “They crawl when they’re asked to bend.”
The essential point here is not to determine who is right or wrong about the riots in either Gujarat or Leicester, but to point out that, as Sunder Katwala, the Director of British Future, remarked in a piece for ConHome just after the 2019 general election, “the political pluralism of British Indian views” has been “much underestimated”.
Hindus don’t all think the same, any more than Anglicans do. Enoch Powell has ceased to be much of a limiting factor for the Conservatives when trying to recruit Hindus, but some of them continue to find Norman Tebbit’s “cricket test” intensely annoying, for they consider themselves British, and support England at football, but the Indian cricket team.
The Overseas Friends of the BJP – Modi’s party – had claimed before the general election that they would remove various British Indian Labour MPs from Parliament, and signally failed to do so, for as Katwala pointed out:
“Labour won 18 of the 20 seats with the highest number of Indian voters – and there will be seven Conservatives, seven Labour MPs and one Liberal Democrat MP with Indian heritage among the 65 ethnic minority MPs in the Commons.”
The swings to the Conservatives in two seats with high numbers of Hindu voters, Harrow East and Leicester East, were a local more than a national phenomenon.
Boastful claims by BJP supporters, reported in The Times of India, that by mobilising the British Indian vote they would swing up to 40 seats to the Conservatives proved to be nonsense.
A survey carried out for the Carnegie Endowment in the summer of 2021 did find some movement by British Hindus away from the Labour Party, but sometimes to the benefit of the Liberal Democrats rather than the Conservatives. Muslims and Sikhs were more inclined to remain loyal to Labour.
It is possible that by fixing our eyes on religion, we have overlooked the importance of other factors for British Hinduism. As Charles Moore noted in The Daily Telegraph on the day after Sunak became Tory leader,
“The choice of Rishi Sunak is a victory for diversity. It is an important breakthrough for the minority community of which he is a part, a minority, that for too long, has been looked down on by the Old Etonians who have traditionally dominated the Conservative Party.
“I refer, of course, to Wykehamists, as old boys of Winchester College are called.”
Sunak is only the second Wykehamist to become Prime Minister, but the sixth to have served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by enabling him to get what he himself has described as an “absolutely marvellous” education at one of the great schools of England, his parents, a doctor and a pharmacist, made his rise to high office much more likely.
In Britain, class matters more than religion, and is closely related to schooling, which Hindus take with the utmost seriousness.