Facing up to anti-Muslim sentiment among Sikhs

So to another Pickled Politics thread. I thought I'd entered a parallel universe when I read the comments on the latest piece by Jai, titled 'British Sikh and Hindu groups release joint statement condemning EDL.' Besides the self-explanatory bit, Jai also provided some context with reference to the Sikh BNP and EDL members and set up a spiritual death-match between Guramit Singh of the EDL and Guru Gobind Singh Ji, the tenth guru of the Sikhs.

The first comment was by our dear Rumbold:

Jai:

While it is good that Hindu and Sikh organisations are condemning the EDL, as the EDL is trying to split Hindus and Sikhs from Muslims, a fair number of ‘mainstream’ Hindus and Sikhs are anti-Muslim; in my narrow circle I know three Hindu and Sikh girls who have been cut off by their families for dating/marrying Muslims. It would be nice to see these organisations attempt to tackle this bigotry too (which is, as you point out, against the teachings of the Gurus).

This is a perfectly fair point, and as someone who came to where I am now through witnessing the stunning bigotry of self-professed 'proper Sikhs,' I do agree wholeheartedly with it. I can't even fault the wording of it, really.

Which is where the parallel universe element came in, in comments in response to Rumbold. Firstly, Leon:

@ Rumbold,

I’m not sure why you’re raising this now, if I didn’t know you I’d say your comment looked like spite at best and at worst an attempt to spike the conversation.

There are issues within the Sikh and Hindu communities but there is also some very good work done within those communities as Jai has rightly shown here.

We need to support them when they’re doing right, and put pressure on them when they are doing wrong, but doing both at the same time just confuses the issue at hand, and sadly plays right into the hands of fascists and rightwing nut jobs like the EDL.

This comment left me aghast for a number of reasons. Earwicga endorsed it, saying 'What Leon said.' With admirable composure, Rumbold responded, touching upon a point I would go on to address:

Leon:

So groups release a statement condemning an Islamaphobic group. Good. I then wonder what they are going to do to challenge Islamaphobia in the wider Sikh and Hindu communities. That seems a reasonable point given the wider battle against anti-Muslim prejudice.

To return to the problems I had with Leon's post... I can fathom why he might have responded as he did (I'm not saying I'm right, merely speculating) - Rumbold being a white, middle-class man, could be seen to be effectively appropriating Sikh/Hindu/Asian concerns and voices. It seems almost as though Rumbold is being accused of concern trolling.

However, while Rumbold certainly cannot speak as a British Asian Sikh - neither can Leon, nor Earwicga. Leon is mixed-race and Earwicga is white. One way in which allies of minority communities - whether they're white, OR of another ethnic minority community - can fuck up is by enthusiastically shooting down people they perceive to be attacking a particular minority so that they, too, end up speaking 'for' that particular minority.

I am a British Asian Sikh - still in many ways culturally Sikh, if not religiously - and I am going to speak in that capacity, with full awareness that I do not represent every Sikh. I do, however, as a woman, represent a section of my particular minority group whose voices are barely tolerated, ignored, silenced and in many cases our opinions are just assumed. Being religion-free is even an advantage here, I would say, as it means I have no overriding interest in protecting 'the community'.

I've addressed the first point in Leon's comment - the defensive reaction to Rumbold's criticism, and I'll now address the second:

There are issues within the Sikh and Hindu communities but there is also some very good work done within those communities as Jai has rightly shown here.

This lazily trades on stereotypical assumptions that Pickled Politics itself started out trying hard to combat, with its fight against self-proclaimed 'community leaders'. There are no 'the Sikh and Hindu communities.' There are no closed, monolithic groups of Sikhs and Hindus as this statement implies. The reference to 'issues' is deliberately minimising - there are many 'issues' in Sikh and Hindu communities, just like there are in all communities, and reference to 'good work' is vague - so what? Christian missionary groups do 'good work' of various kinds - does this mean that they can't be criticised? I think not. A much more honest and accurate statement would have been to say:

There are issues with anti-Muslim sentiment within Sikh and Hindu communities but there is also some very good work done to combat it within those communities as Jai has rightly shown here.

The problem, of course, which both Rumbold and myself pointed out, is that actions do not necessarily equal words. As anti-racist activists and womanists know, it's easy to release a statement condemning the most extreme examples of bigoted behaviour in a community without addressing much more common casual bigotries. We are constantly told to take white people's condemnation of the BNP, KKK, etc. as proof that we are 'post-racial', for example, which is absolutely fucking laughable when you consider that there is an established, overwhelmingly white movement in the US to discredit the black President by claiming that he was not really born in America and is not therefore American and also that a bunch of middle-class white men on an inexplicably-popular BBC show recently made the most appalling comments about Mexicans - straight out of the Republican playbook - and got away with it in the name of 'humour.'

White people fall over themselves to defend racism (and other bigotries) on the grounds of 'humour,' 'irony', and sometimes evoke the current trendy dead horse, of 'privacy' as in this shockingly shit piece by Charlie Brooker. The fact that the people that they are belittling are equal human beings never seems to count as a serious point worthy of consideration, should make it clear that we are not, in fact, equal human beings. I have seen and heard members of my family make 'humorous' anti-Muslim comments, but on the whole, the anti-Muslim sentiment that I've seen in Hindus and Sikhs comes from deficient self-awareness, massive, massive ignorance about Indian history and the lack of a secular political discourse in India. I probably won't elaborate just now - I'll save it for another post - but these are things which need addressing quite urgently. Since organised religion is about the religious group, not just individual belief, the signatories to the statement need to make sure that they are actively working to combat anti-Muslim sentiment in their communities wherever possible, not just by (in the case of Sikhs) pointing out how important Muslims have been in aiding the Gurus in Sikh history, but by encouraging Sikhs and Muslims to interact socially and not treating religion as a zero-sum game. Just because the Abrahamic religions all have a tortured, competitive relationship with each other, does not mean that Sikhs need to play that game - can we not just set ourselves apart, in the way that Buddhists seem to have done?

On to Leon's final point, while left me utterly enraged. I've split it into two parts:

1) We need to support them when they’re doing right, and put pressure on them when they are doing wrong 2) but doing both at the same time just confuses the issue at hand, and sadly plays right into the hands of fascists and rightwing nut jobs like the EDL.

1) Who the fuck is this 'we', and who the fuck are 'them'? Just who speaks for who here? If, as I suspect, Leon's 'we' refers to the likes of Rumbold, Earwicga etc. - then I would say - good, you see that NONE of you has the right to frame this debate. It comes across as unbelievably patronising - somewhat reminiscent of cultural relativism. We don't really understand the Other, and we don't want to be seen to judge, so let's hold our noses and let 'them' self-regulate! I thought Sunny and PP's good work combating community leaders was supposed to expose how contentious all this 'we' and 'they' BS is. Do I not belong to 'they' because I am an atheist? Or because I am a woman? It's just that, the kind of people who have the official authority to issue these kinds of media-friendly statements, don't generally get to where they are by giving a shit about people like me. They generally try to discipline and/or disown me - I have had this happen with the Sikh commenters on PP as well as in 'real life.'

2) Reading this, you would think that the EDL have some kind of direct line to every media outlet, imminently on the verge of being voted into office/picked to present Desert Island Discs/hired to write for the Daily Mail. As Jai's post points out, these are people who are so thick that, despite having a non-Muslim of Indian descent in their ranks, they couldn't tell the difference between Muslims and Hindus:

The EDL’s previous claims to be opposed “only to militant Islam” are further thrown into question by the fact that, for example, in October 2010 they held a large demonstration in Leicester, a city where the majority of British Asians are actually Gujarati Hindus. Furthermore, the rally was held during Navratri, a major annual Hindu festival which is of particular importance to Gujarati Hindus and which occurs just a couple of weeks before Diwali itself. I expect an “anti-Islam” rally by the EDL outside the Hare Krishna temple in Watford is next; and yes, I’m obviously being sarcastic, but you get my point.

While the bigotry of such a group should never be underestimated, we British Asians should also not have to carry with us the perpetual fear that 'something might happen.' This is our country too and we have just as much right to it as fuckwit bigots - our parents and predecessors took on racists more shameless and violent than this, in a public climate vastly less favourable to them (I think it was mentioned in the Sanjeev Bhaskar episode of The House That Made Me that during the Southall anti-NF demo in which Blair Peach died, the police were protecting the racists - I wouldn't be surprised). Central to that is not just highlighting the odd PR moment of 'unity' and trying to educate people about religious history, but acknowledging that people do say these anti-Muslim things in our community and taking them on. Failing to do so simply encourages a 'business as usual' approach where people provide the odd utopian soundbite and then go back to segregated lives of fear, ignorance and communalism.

I have also come to have a major bee in my bonnet about this 'you can't do two things at once' bollocks. It reeks of culturally-relativist arguments, as I said above, laden as it is with the sense of giving cookies. Let me explain the feminist concept of 'giving cookies' (WARNING: no actual cookies involved):

A feminist cookie is the term for the reward some men seem to be seeking for saying or doing something feminist. (There are equivalents for, eg, white people and being anti-racist or straight people and being anti-homophobia.)

In short, when people ask for cookies, they are essentially seeking credit where it's not really due. It's like when my brother thinks he should be thanked for loading the dishwasher, when my mum has done it every day for over 20 years. Even when people/groups aren't or don't seem to be seeking cookies, that doesn't mean they should be given. This goes back to what I was saying about Leon's comment being patronising: why t-f should we give these prominent Sikhs and Hindus cookies for releasing a statement?! How many people in their congregations are going to actually read or process it? Furthermore, how does effectively saying 'Islamophobia is bad, it hurts us all, I despair of it' actually translate to standing with our Muslim brethren? If there are actually going to be efforts in place, from here, to increase understanding between people, then great. My parents and family know that anti-Muslim sentiment is bad, which is why they get so defensive when I contend that Muslims are people too - it doesn't stop them from making bigoted throwaway remarks and going on lengthy rants about how Muslims are 'taking over' which verge on BNP/EDL rhetoric.

As a result of the way I was raised, I had a lot of pre-conceptions about Muslims and apprehension about social contact with them. A co-worker and students at my university helped me to start dumping the dirt from my mind, and then I met ACTUAL MUSLIMS via another job and Pickled Politics and a former Islamist is now one of my best friends. I still have my issues with Islam, but I have TRIED to challenge what was presented as reality to me. That is the kind of thing we need if we want to make a difference.

Ironically, given the reference to 'divide and rule' in the statement itself, Leon employs that classic tactic against dissent when he says that:

doing both at the same time [praising and criticising Sikh and Hindu groups for their reaction towards anti-Muslim sentiment in their ranks] just confuses the issue at hand, and sadly plays right into the hands of fascists and rightwing nut jobs like the EDL.

As I said in my angry comment in the thread - this tactic was used against women during the nationalist movement. Indian men emotionally blackmailed women in the emergent women's movement, presenting them with a choice between rights for women and rights for the nation as if the two were incompatible with each other. The idea of women as a transcendent political grouping threatened the oppressive edifice that nationalism was built on - the bodies of women imprisoned within the home, Indian clothes and domesticity. Thus Gandhi could present himself as being on the side of the suffragettes, while he promoted deeply regressive ideas about women that reduced them to a male-created ideal of femininity even whilst fetishising this ideal. The result, as Geraldine Forbes points out, was 'the development of [...] 'feminist nationalism'' in which female activists and their energies were co-opted to the national cause - exactly as happened with British feminists during the First World War.

Furthermore, it is not the '70s and '80s any more. A lot of British Asians feel comfortably settled here now, and the urgency that drove them to overcome their prejudices and unite with people they are normally so dismissive of - blacks, Muslims, etc. - isn't pressing any longer. There is never a 'right time' for criticism, as the Egyptian protests show - you just have to seize your moment, and a moment when cookies are uncritically being given to organisations for being seen to be 'doing' something is just perfect for me. Shocking though it is, I think we are all adult enough to handle the idea of communities as being permanently complex and multi-faceted, not lurching between 'doing right' and 'doing wrong' and capable of doing only one or the other at once. Implying that questioning - not even criticising - the groundwork beneath a PR gesture, is somehow selling everyone out to the racists, is rather low.

I'll try and return soon to elaborate on the problem of anti-Muslim sentiment among British Asian Sikhs (and Hindus), and consider the misunderstandings that fuel it.

Skin deep and deeper

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to do something unprecedented:

That right there - that is me. Of COURSE I always look exactly like that :-D. As you can see, I look sort of - well, you know. Unspecified. What ethnicity would you say I was? Do you have one particular idea en tête, or would you hedge your bets?

Anyone who reads this blog regularly (not a lot of you, I'd warrant) knows that I'm of Indian extraction. The only person to ever guess that correctly, however, was a Turkish man. The most frequent guesses are Iranian, Greek, Spanish and Turkish. The first two in particular.

So, what was the point of all this apparent navel-gazing and skin-based angsting? Well, this post was inspired by a sarky comment in response to a comment of mine. The poster wrote:

Personally I've yet to cash in on my white male privilige, but if I could get one of the brotherhood to get me a well-paid sinecure, a detatched house in Shropshire & a ridiculously beautiful wife I'd be grateful. The system surely wouldn't leave one of its own living on a council estate in Stoke, would it? But I must have been absent on the day they taught us how to exploit our advantages...

This didn't make me as angry as it might've. Strange formulation that - but accurate. I think the fact that the poster didn't dismiss the notion of privilege outright gave me hope. I got a picture of somebody who doesn't fully understand how racial privilege works (fair enough, it's not particularly easy to explain or understand).

I decided to strike back at this using my own personal experience. Many white people, especially those who are of working-class backgrounds but educated (like this fella was) have a hard time accepting the fact that they have an advantage over people who aren't white. Given that there are highly successful middle-class Asians and blacks in this country, you can sort of almost see what they mean.

However, the fact is that 90% of this country's population is white, and if you don't belong to a 'model minority' (read: if you're Muslim), your life is NOT going to be easy, because if there's one thing the papers hate more than chavs, it's you. Let's not forget the fact that many who claim to be Islamophobes are actually 'Muslimphobes'. For people like that, supporters of the BNP and similar - the technicalities are unimportant. The colour of your skin says it all.

Hence this post. I have always made people uncomfortable. Sometimes it's something I enjoy, sometimes it's highly isolating. When I was younger and trying hard to be what my family wanted, I actually felt bad about the way I look. Why couldn't I look more like other Sikhs in my area? Why wasn't I a 'proper' Asian girl? Most of the Asian teenage girls I knew were identikit black-clad, feather-haired clones. However, as well as dress, their complexions and features united them. Most of them had a skin tone like Parminder Nagra's or Konnie Huq's, and were either long and skinny or tiny and skinny.

My family are all quite fair by Indian standards, but I was most definitely the freak. Naturally, this HAD to be topped off by my having a rounded body with large breasts. The day of reckoning, when I faced down my actual size, was terrifying enough without my mother's input. We were going to India soon afterwards, and I had to get bras my actual size. 'I'll get a few here and some in India,' I told her.
'No!' I knew she was appalled that I had let her down by allowing myself to be so un-Asian, but this was a bit much... 'They won't have them. Your size doesn't exist in India.'

I thought this was a joke. It wasn't. Every time we went shopping and even remotely neared a rack of underwear-type garments, I would start looking, with no success. Underwear aside, even most of the 'Western' clothes could only have been worn by me when I was hitting adolescence! My body was wrong. My face was most definitely wrong - I realised my features were not tiny and delicate, and I didn't have huge eyes like Indian women are often expected to have. Nor was I anywhere near being a Bollywood actress.

Men and women alike gawped at me and gave me hostile stares while I was in India. In France, people automatically asked where I was from whenever we were introduced, and when I was there with my ex-boyfriend (who is unmistakably Asian in comparison) we got some looks of absolute loathing. Even in this country, once I venture out of the little Asian enclave where I grew up, I notice people looking at me sharply. Some people are just curious of course, but the fact is that I make others uncomfortable. They can't 'place' me automatically, they can't fit characteristics and assumptions to me just like that. It should be fun, but it's often not. South Asian women often give me hostile and disapproving looks. I don't totally blame them for it, because Indian culture obsessively prizes fair-skinned women, leading to the coinage of the famously awkward term 'wheatish' in matrimonial adverts. Old white women have looked at me with a kind of disgust. That was just when I was with my white boyfriend!

On my own (and with him), I have had to deal with territorial behaviour and disapproving glances from Arab and Asian men alike. I've occasionally had white tourists look at me for that bit too long. I think the problem is that I look so close to white, but for those who are looking hard, my features have something oddly Arabic about them. My hair's a bit too dark. I'm not as rosy as a white person should be; nor am I white enough. Though it might sound crazy, sometimes I catch myself worrying that people look at us together because they think that I am 'not white enough for him'. Why do I even have to worry about shit like that?!

The point I'm trying to make, is that this just goes to show that white privilege does exist. Just because people aren't aware of how it works, or don't consciously choose to exploit it, it doesn't mean that it's not there. The only other people I know who've had similar experiences to mine are a) Asians/blacks who are perceived as 'wanting to be white' ('coconuts' or 'chickpeas', as I've been called myself) and b) mixed-race people. If you're white in this country, you're part of the majority and you get to be invisible. Even in London, where everyone wants to be invisible. Not even consciously, but recently I have perhaps begun trying to 'pass' more than previously. I say 'not consciously' because I do want to look different to other Asian girls, but not for research's sake - just because I love colour! The more I've tried to 'pass,' the more I see that I can't, not fully, but that it is advantageous to do so. Who thinks indie girls are 'exotic,' after all?

The whole thing doesn't generally bother me that much, because I like to have both parts to my identity: British and Asian. 'White' and 'brown.' Still, everyone has times where they want to belong, where it feels safer to be part of a pack, and frankly, I can't choose. Many middle-class Asian kids like to think they can 'choose' their identities by pretending to be black, but it doesn't really work. They are almost all eventually faced with the choice of being 'true to themselves,' being 'black' or being 'white.' Usually, 'true to themselves' means acting black for a while, then shifting back to becoming like a white middle-class person, with the extra Asian culture thrown in for good measure. White people never really get made to 'choose' unless it's the tired old narrative of 'selling out their class' by moving up socially. Even then, it's on one front. Try having to 'choose' twice over! Minority cultures dismiss their own for acting 'white,' but white people are allowed to 'act black.' For example, consider how common it is to have white rap artists (Beastie Boys, Eminem, Asher Roth, Skinnyman, etc. etc.); how many black or Asian artists can you think of who are as well-established in 'white' forms of music (country, indie, electro)? Kele from Bloc Party, TV On The Radio, er... Their (white people's) identity is not getting erased by their doing so - because they are over-represented everywhere in mainstream popular culture (and even more so in 'high' culture). To be invisible and yet omnipresent. What is that, if not privilege?

G20 Protests: The Problem...

I was commenting on a thread on Pickled Politics about the G20 protests, and something suddenly crystallised inside my head. I knew right then and there that I had to write this post.

The problem with the G20 protests, I realised, is that they fit into a common, polarised narrative. The reason this scares me so much is because all the protestors are doing is expressing an anger that most people have about the irresponsible way in which our financial institutions have behaved.

Note the italics. Did you note my italics? I hope so. The reason I did that is because I want to emphasise - perhaps rather pointlessly - that many of us share common ground with the protestors. Even some readers of the Daily Fail.

That's just the problem though. The mainstream media (MSM) - and let me say that in this description, I include the free daily London papers as well - has pursued a dangerously successful agenda of 'divide and conquer.' Sunny pointed out, I think in the comments, how many journalists were busy highlighting the minority of protestors who were violent, rather than focussing on the entirely peaceful Climate Camp protestors.

Going on to any site - PP, Comment is Free, whatever - I am struck how there are a range of 'stock positions' which people fall into. When I went on to Liberal Conspiracy, the commenter 'Letters From A Tory' said the following:

Honestly, Sunny - I have no idea how you can be so naive. You join a mass protest that was always going to attract a violent element, then complain that the police were keen to contain the protest.

I wrote you a letter on my blog this morning explaining why your account of yesterday’s events is at best laughable and at worst idiotic.

This made me angry. The whole thing makes me angry. Why in the fuck was it 'always going to attract a violent element'? Why do we have these expectations of events?

Prior to the events actually happening, there was more of this sort of attitude. I read a frankly infuriating column in thelondonpaper, which I will reproduce when I get back to my flat. I notice this attitude appearing more and more frequently - it was apparent in quite a few of the letters as well. It was the stupid daily column where they get members of the public to write in about something they care about - I think it has to be 500 words or something.

The author of the piece argued that the protests were putting '1 million people at risk' and that '95% of the protestors don't know why they are protesting' (um, how do you know?). He also used the age-old assumption of many a knobhead that the protestors were simply people who didn't have a job to go to (again - how do you know?), and thereby trying to ruin things for those who did.

Behind this blithe shower of bollocks (which I found all the more astonishing given that in that very issue of the paper, there were comments on how many local businesses were actually being closed and people advised not to leave their homes in order to keep them safe - hardly 'at risk') was a common belief that I see on the Internet and in newspapers (often on the Internet versions of newspapers, haha). It was the deformation of those that one does not agree with, the lionising of those that one does agree with - in short, the breakdown of a highly complex event into a battle between two opposing factions.

The MSM has been subtly priming us to think this way in the run-up to this event, and so before, during and after, people fall back into their 'stock positions.' You have the 'amused/contemptuous cynic' (as shown by LFaT above), the 'earnest and frustrated protestor/supportive journalist/victim', the 'misunderstood third party' (i.e. in this case, people claiming to be members of the police sticking up for themselves) and then a whole load of people trying to intercede somewhere between all this.

That column exemplified this 'divide and conquer' strategy that is so often. Most often, it's apparent when right-wing papers talk about non-whites and immigrants. The 'us' and the 'them.' I hadn't realised it was being practised in this instance. I was naive; I never realised that the papers could use such an ingenious method of turning apathy lucrative. People no longer interested in traditional political parties? The Labour/Conservative divide just not working any more, because they seem to be merging into each other? Great! Give the people what they're crying for! Give them division!

It's deeply insidious - I read an interview with the editor of thelondonpaper when I was doing a project on the British and French daily papers last year. He had this to say:

"Free papers acknowledge the realities of young people's lives and, pretty much everywhere in the world, they are politically neutral. All the research shows that young people dislike political bias in newspapers and they are sick of being preached at by journalists. That's why they don't want to read columnists either."

and this

"Our appeal is that we're the antithesis of their 'Little Englander' mentality."

Riiiight - that's why you regularly publish the kind of thing that was in that daily column, and letters like the slew of ones slagging off the protestors. The star letter was from somebody advising people to 'hold up a bar of soap' to the protestors because it would have the same effect as garlic on a vampire, or something along those lines. Bullshit are the free papers neutral. London Lite and Metro belong to Associated Newspapers which publishes - *gasp* - The Daily Mail. Thelondonpaper is published by News International - which publishes The Sun, The Times and The News of the World. Gee, is anyone seeing a theme here? Lord Rothermere, Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch - yeah, that's absolutely synonymous with being 'politically neutral' in my book... [/sarcasm]

It's very clever. These freesheets may claim to be neutral by not publishing anything overtly inflammatory - but by ensuring that you highlight the content sent in by your most bigoted readers and laying out your coverage of issues just so - that doesn't sound politically neutral to me, that sounds like you're surreptitiously favouring an agenda...

So yeah, as I already commented, now we have 'ordinary, peaceful, hard-working Britons/Londoners' vs 'jobless/time-wasting, violent protestors,' 'helpless scapegoat working-class City employees' vs 'middle-class protestors who are probably all in charge anyway', 'the faceless and brutal police' vs 'well-meaning but radicalised protestors', 'the trouble-making protestors' vs 'the poor police just doing their jobs'... On and on it goes. Of course, many of these battles are bundled up together, i.e. the first two. It's almost impressive - you can have many binaries operating at once - but somehow, we're not advanced enough to realise that real life isn't a black-and-white binary.

Shades of grey exist, bitches. Maybe it's about time we started taking the joke that all journalists are just failed novelists seriously?

Seriously though, we all need to be alert and wary, for dehumanising is a tactic common to - what? Think about it. War, yes, that's right! Consider that recent story about Israeli soldiers' awful T-shirts which make light of things like murdering pregnant Palestinian women. Think of the war on terror as well, and how the MSM (the right-wing papers in particular) have worked overtime to dehumanise not only extremists, but Muslims in general, as a way to avoid engaging with the fact that the 7/7 bombers were 'homegrown.' Sure, they reported it. However, as any fule kno, reporting an issue and engaging critically and analytically with it are not the same thing. If they were, we wouldn't have comment sections in papers, and there'd be no need for blogs.

Whether we like it or not, whether we'd take to the streets over how we felt about an issue or not - these protestors are 'us.' Bigots, unfortunately, are 'us.' Is there really a 'them'? There will, for the purposes of political manouevre, always be a 'them' but we are the ones who read the papers. We are the ones who feed off these divisions. The scores of annoying, smug pricks who were predicting how the protests would end were smug precisely because they are making the narrative. They know that life is perfectly capable of imitating art, so to speak. We can only try to keep some hope about the whole affair - and remember that everybody is human. Even Josef Fritzl, a perfect example of what happens when we fail to take adequate responsibility for each other. We lock ourselves into destructive cycles and never progress.

This bit:

his mother Maria, who herself had been fostered as a child, had had him "solely in order to prove to the world that she was not infertile" following a marriage which broke up because it produced no children.

"Herr Fritzl was a 'proof child', an 'alibi child'," she said, adding that this "was his only function as a child". "As a consequence he was a burden to her, something she was forced to look after". She said that Fritzl, now 73, struggled throughout his childhood to form a relationship with his mother but that "it was impossible to build up any sort of bond of trust with her".

The fear he felt by her constant absences was never more intense than during the second world war bombing raids on their home town of Amstetten. She refused to take refuge in the air raid shelter near to the family home, insisting on staying in the house and sending her son into the underground shelter instead. "As a result he suffered from an overwhelming sense of anxiety, not knowing when the air raid was over whether or not the only person in the world to whom he had any relationship, would still be alive," she said. "It's the type of fear that over time has a huge impact on a person".

... made me want to cry. I can see clearly how the leap from an unloved little boy to an incestuous rapist was made - and it is essential that we see that, and not tidy this all away as if it has been resolved. It hasn't. Humanity, if it really thinks it's superior to the animals, needs to learn to take full responsibility for itself. Just because we've invented the Internet, it DOESN'T mean we've got any less thick! Sigh...

A music video for cheer-up's sake. YEAH THE BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA!

An article, which I've just inadvertently realised, plugs neatly into what I've just said.

Bigotry and Suffering

So here I am, hiding out in my room upstairs, as all my family bar one sister and life-long family friends enjoy themselves downstairs. When they arrived, I actually made an effort to be sociable. We talked about university and work and my plans for next year, and I was (much to my surprise) encouraged to do a Master's and think about academia, because if you can stomach all the studying, it's a pretty comfortable life. I concurred based on what I know and paused resignedly every now and again as people talked over me, interrupted me, or rushed out before I could finish what I was saying.

(Story of my life, and now you know why I vent myself crazy on this here blog!).

I was delighted to speak to a fellow English student (well... former in her case), being as I was able to exclude my sister and brother for once. That sounds bad, but growing up in a house full of medically-oriented people has had the effect that nobody respects me at all, even though I don't exactly exaggerate the importance of what I do. My sisters, when they are both here together, talk pharmacy. My brother, trainee doc that he is, sometimes joins in and if my brother-in-law is here, they talk medicine too.

So, it was a pleasure to establish a connection of my OWN for once, and to talk about Forster, Lawrence and Huxley; to hold forth on The Trial. I don't do it to say 'Look at me, I'm so clever,' but I do enjoy talking about it because it impassions me and in this family where I am a solitary alien, I never get to enjoy that. Used as I am to being babied, bullied and bitched at, for me to be able to say what I THINK and talk about things that interest ME is a rare treat indeed.

However, as I observed in the first paragraph, even that scant moment of happiness does not remain unmitigated. It was positively annihilated, however, by what came next. We shifted rooms in order to sit in the 'back room' (the extension) and there was eating and general conversation. I groaned inwardly at the sight of all the calorific treats which are in the process of making me get fat and giving me more spots than I've ever had in my whole life. I know the latter to be true from looking at pictures of myself and also from the succession of comments from my mother and sisters. My mum in particular remarked upon it almost angrily, as though it were my fault. In her head, I'm sure it is, for some roundabout reason or another.

(One plus point of the day though - I was wearing a ribbon in my hair and for once my brother didn't call me 'Gyppo' as he usually does, but I think that was only because of the guests...).

I was focussing my energies, after consuming a suitably small amount of fried nonsense, on trying to work out the fiendishly elaborate 80s Bollywood film that my dad had on as background noise. There was a sequence where a baddie kept repeatedly being 'attacked' by a falcon which had previously stolen another man's handgun which amused me no end (more genius of the utterly WTF? category)! It didn't save me though, oh no. Not even this year would I get away without having my holidays ruined by the bigotry that is almost integral to these intimate family get-togethers.

Suddenly, before I could even get a handle on where it had sprung from, the subject of the Pakistan-India tensions caught the collective imagination. The mother of the family who are our family friends (the 'children' are my sisters' age, i.e. late 20s, so the two sisters get on with my sisters and their elder brother is just kind of there, like a pot plant) remarked on how she would love for India to simply bomb Pakistan out of existence. Her son spoke up to support her.

Then, the fun kicked off and we got into some good old-fashioned Muslim-bashing. My dad said, how could you associate with people like that when you knew that they were looking at you and deciding that you had to CONVERT in order to be their friends (um, a little exaggeration there, perhaps, Pater?). The son informed us all of how it was 'their mission' to convert the whole world to Islam. For no apparent reason, the 'girls' talked about how they had seen the roads in India lined with goats when they were there 'and we asked him why and he said because it was Eid'. Cue agitated fawning all around for the poor goats that were going to be killed!

(Just like the billions of cows that die worldwide to feed people every year, but I didn't hear any railing against that. Funny really, as this family are Hindus, I would've expected to... Perchance it was because those are not just eaten by Muslims?).

There was talk of how the Arab nations are 'uncivilised' and also of how they are 'dirty.' Bollocks! cried the ghost of GCSE history from the depths of my stomach. Absolute fucking bollocks! They were advanced in medicine long before the West got a clue, and they invented geometry! As usual, however, as one of the youngest in the room and the only person who has bothered to question any of these 'hand-me-down' opinions, I knew better than to open my mouth.

Support for the complete eradication of Pakistan gathered around the room. 'Ethnic cleansing!' my sister proclaimed jauntily. In my already-twisting guts, I felt the amorphous horror of a face trying to force itself upwards, a scream trying to make itself heard. 'These are absolute dogs' the mother of the family kept repeating. All Muslims everywhere ever were blamed for the ills of the world. It was conceded by the eldest daughter that ha, now it was the whole world at their mercy. I believe the mother said something about how 50% of the population being born in India were Muslims.

Oh-so-patriotic anxiety was expressed over poor little India being surrounded, as my pater put it, by 'Bangladesh. Muslim. Pakistan. Muslim... and there's the Muslims in India!' (I managed to refrain from pointing out that Indian Muslims have themselves condemned the Mumbai attacks). Resentment was expressed about the fact that many Indian Muslims were originally, er, not Muslim (I restrained myself from mentioning that in some cases, as with the Dalits, people have voluntarily converted to Islam because they think it will improve their lives which are rigidly bound by the caste-system promoted by... errr, Hinduism and the conservative Indian culture. Also, if people are so cut up about the fact that their families 'used to be' whatever, why not convert back to that religion?).

Pakistan was roundly and repeatedly blamed and the census opinion was that nobody within its borders should live, they should all be bombed out of existence and then the world's troubles would cease! (How I itched to remark that this wouldn't really resolve the problem of the spread of the noxious Wahabbi ideology which originates from... *gasp* SAUDI ARABIA). The 'evil Muslims' seam was rich with satisfaction waiting to be mined by the roomful of my 'nearest and dearest' (ha!), as evidenced by the fact that when my sister came back in from making tea, she went 'Aww, has the Muslim-bashing stopped? Don't start again without me!' and laughed before exiting the room.

I feel depressed and terrified when this happens to me. It also makes me very, very aware of how alone I am. Often when I was younger, I would castigate myself for these feelings. While everyone else laughed blithely, content in the glow of their reductionist bigotry, I felt my innards interlacing, a near-rigor mortis of discomfort immobilising me against the wave of hate. Why did I have to be awkward? Why couldn't I just join in the anti-Muslim fun without feeling bad? Why did I see them as people and feel it almost as much as a slight against myself, when my family - people who I KNEW to be capable of moral character in other situations - had no problem with it?

The answer, ironically enough, was because I saw myself as a Sikh. Even though I am unsure about the existence of God these days, I still see myself as so bound by Sikh philosophy that even if I wanted to, I couldn't change. Yet clearly something was wrong because my family claimed to be Sikhs too. My dad is baptised and has the 5 Ks. My siblings have been much more active 'within the community' than I ever was. Yet I used to pray regularly and I still do try to treat people equally, taking the story of Bhai Kanhaiya Ji as an influence. The Gurus might have had a historical enmity with some of the Mughal rulers, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of Sikh history will be aware of the fact that this is by no means applicable to all the Mughal rulers, let alone all Muslims, plenty of whom were devotees of the Gurus! Even Guru Gobind Singh, who created the notion of the Khalsa, to which my parents cling in keeping with 'neo-Sikhism', was saved by Muslims! (Scroll down to the final paragraph to see what I'm talking about).

I'm no longer vegetarian, even though my hair remains uncut and my kara on, but I can't believe the hypocrisy of it all. This has disturbed me ever since I became aware of it, because it made me see the futility of truth before ritual. Even though, according to the BBC's 'Sikhism at a Glance,' I am a better Sikh than my family, the fact that they observe ritual more means that they have authority in the eyes of everyone else. Pathetic. As I wrote in a poem inspired by my experiences, '‘Twas the evil in my own home / to make me doubt the existence of a God.'

Yet part of me panics when I see this. Does this mean that loads and loads of people out there think like this? How alone am I? Can the world really be full of people who are ignorant and tribalist and hateful? Whenever I used to show little signs of subversion, when I was younger, my parents always disarmed me with the warning that I should 'stick to my own kind' and when I admitted to agnosticism, one of the main weapons my mother used against me was the recommendation that I should be 'part of a group' because it's 'safer' and that way you can fight against other groups. Er... isn't that the sort of mentality that's led to the apparently ever-worsening gang-related violence on our streets?

Now, in a convoluted way, my mother has a point because Sikhism is about fighting for the rights of the downtrodden and standing up for the oppressed - but I don't see what reason Sikhs have to be playing the 'victim' card as my parents so often like to do. Average Muslims could if they wanted to, but a lot of them just want to get on with their lives. I can't let that go unsaid, because I refuse to stop seeing the fact of people's humanity in favour of other categories. Does that make me a fool? And still the question circulates in my mind: who's the real Sikh here?