The REAL STORY Of South Asians In Britain

The relationship of Britain and its South Asian communities has never been more confounding. In 2010, Sedasi became Britain's first ever South Asian cabinet minister. That was a first in 2010. But by 2026, we've had a South Asian prime minister. South Asians in every great office of state and across business and the media, the level of visibility in public life of South Asians has never been higher. Compared to most of the West, Britain looks like a paragon of integration. But, and there's a big butt, 2024 also saw the most vicious racist riots in a generation and reform and even more so restore a reawakening Britain's ethnist demons. Now, all this means it's a pertinent time to publish a study on the history of Britain's South Asian communities. Come what may, we're here to stay is a new book released today by the writer Taj Ali who joined me earlier today. Taj Ali, um, thank you so much for joining us in the Navar Media studio. Um, your new book, Come What May, We're We're Here to Stay, the story of South Asian resistance in Britain, um, was released yesterday. Um, so congratulations. Um, why did you write this book in this moment? >> So, I was 12 years old when the English Defense League marched through my hometown, Luton, and I remember being told by one of my teachers, you shouldn't go into the town center because the EDL are in town. And so from a very young age as a British Pakistani Muslim, I was grappling with questions of identity and belonging. And I spoke to my father who told me there were certain roads in the 70s and 80s that you couldn't walk through as a black or brown person because you'd get beaten up by racists. And so we knew these stories of racism in our communities, but we also knew these stories of resistance. And so I felt there was an urgent task both to document history. Lots of the history in Asian working-class communities is oral history, things we'd hear from our elders who worked in factories, but it's not really been written down anywhere. And some of these people were getting old and I felt there was a risk that history could be lost. So that was the first purpose was to record and document history. The second was for us to take inspiration from that history given we are again dealing with an increase in racist violence. Um, research from the British Muslim Trust has told us that a mosque in Britain is attacked every 5 days. Two years ago, we had the worst racist rioting in living memory. Um, and there were many of the more isolated ethnic minority communities in the northeast of England in parts of Murzyside in Essex who were terrified. And it wasn't just the violence, it was also the fears. I spoke to a Muslim woman who was having panic attacks during that time. I knew of people who take took a whole week off from work. Um, recently I've been reporting in Baseldon in Essex where a Muslim woman who wears a headscarf tells me that when she's trying to cross the road with her kids at a zebra crossing, cars are refusing to stop, people are throwing objects at them. So, racist violence is bad in 2026. We saw what happened in Belfast recently where people were quite literally being burnt out of their homes. And I think there's an entire generation who are grappling with these questions today and trying to figure out well what can we do about it because we can't be paralyzed into inaction. And so the other purpose of this book is to inspire our communities. And when I say our communities, I mean all of our communities because South Asian history in Britain is also British history. Just as history has shaped us, we've also shaped history. So it was about talking about agency and talking about resistance rather than these narratives of South Asians being passive victims of racism, colonialism and exploitation. >> And the title, come what may, we're here to stay. So this is a a history of South Asian resistance in in Britain. Was that the first sort of demand was that we we get to stay here, right? We're not going anywhere else. >> No, it wasn't not at all. Um the first demand was treat us with basic dignity and respect. Treat us like your fellow human beings. We are neither all saints nor all sinners. We are individuals. And South Asians have been present in Britain for over 400 years. Uh there's a great intellectual civandon who says we are here because you were there. Referring to the British Empire. So most migrants to Britain whether they were seafarers working on British ships, servants in the households of aristocrats in the 17th century uh or other laborers who came here in the 40s,50s and of course in much greater number in the 60s. They didn't think they were going to stay in Britain. They thought they would earn enough and go back to their countries. There was a second generation, the children of migrants born in Britain dealing with racist abuse, humiliation by their own school teachers, uh, no basic dignity in the workplace, who said enough is enough. We're not going to put our heads down and try and be the good immigrants. We are going to resist this racism. And they were forced to do so because they had no other choice. The police were of very little help. There were many many examples of racist violence, racist murders. This year marks 50 years since the racist murder of Gurep Singh Chuga in South. And it was that experience of racism and violence, relentless racism from both the state and street gangs that led young South Asians in Britain to say we are going to organize. And so come what may we're here to stay was a rallying cry of the Asian youth movements. I believe it originated in the campaign of a South Asian woman called Anwa Ditta who was an anti-deportation activist. She was a Kashmiri woman. She was born in Birmingham and lived in Rodale. She dressed like our mothers and sisters and she spoke at over 400 public meetings. The home office said that her Pakistanborn children weren't hers and she refused to take that as a as an answer. And so her campaigning led to Channel 4 commissioning a documentary which proved that her kids were hers. And she spoke on stages with people like Tony Ben and Arthur Skaggle. She linked her struggle with other struggles like the anti-aparttheide struggle. And when she won her campaign, she brought other South Asian Asian women to the front of that campaign. So it's also about honoring these remarkable individuals whose stories are too often forgotten and ignored. and and what's a movement um from South Asian British history or incident that that you think is sort of under discussed that not enough people know about? >> I think just the long presence of South Asians in Britain. We tend to think of South Asians arriving after the Second World War and we've been here for over 400 years and that shocks people when you tell you it. But some of the earliest multicultural communities in Britain are in the British port cities, Liverpool, Cardiff, South Shields. And you had South Asian communities with black communities and Chinese communities living there for so long. So when people talk about, you know, I want my country back, Britain, make Britain white again. It's not been white for that long. >> It's not been that way. And even when we talk about migration, lots of the white working class in many industrial towns and cities, they're also the children of migrants from Scotland, from Ireland, from depressed parts of county Durham in the 20s, they also migrated. So our stories are not so different. I guess the other stories that I think are quite neglected when we think about the history is the self-organizing. You know, we will read the literature about the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, but there was lots of informal organizing in our communities. And there were people who never went under banners. They never had organizational names. They were just trying to defend their communities. They were just trying to find a place to live. And so, it's about honoring workingclass history. Uh, one of the stories I tell in the book is of a place called India House. This was a student residence in Highgate, North London, Leafy Street, 65 Cromwell Avenue. You wouldn't think it would be the epicenter of Indian revolutionary activity in Britain, but it was. And the reason I know this history is because the British state spied upon all these Indian students in 1905. So if you go to the British Library, they have the India office records and they have all of these detailed surveillance files on all of these radical students who are smuggling weapons into the subcontinent, who are doing bomb making workshops in the gardens, who were talking to Irish Republicans and were also working alongside each other regardless of race [snorts] and religion. And that's another theme we see in the history of South Asians is that we took from other communities. Many of the radical Asian youth movements learned from the Black Power movement. Malcolm X visited Britain on four separate occasions when he visited Smemedi after the worst racist election in British history. The Indian Workers Association described it as a shot in the arm of the anti-racist struggle. Many of us learned from the Irish struggle and we adopted the tactics of the home rule movements. And so I think that's an interesting story there about solidarity and building bridges between other communities as well. The word that's sort of very prominent when it comes to mainstream conversations about Britain and South Asians is integration. >> And that can even happen in in one of two forms. So one sort of celebrating the fact that there are so many South Asian people in positions of prominence and power. We've had a South Asian prime minister, the current home secretary of South Asian. And then also there's this question about a lack of integration or purported lack of integration I should say um where different communities are living different lives. And I wonder how sort of like your studies into resistance, how do you relate to to that question of integration? >> Well, it's interesting when you look at the immigrant experience in the 60s, if you went into the houses of the Windrush generation, they'd be portraits of the monarchs. um South Asians and West Indians would dress very smart suits and ties. Very s very few seeks would grow out their beards or wear a turban because they felt that the racism and the hostility was so bad that they're going to have to uh force themselves to assimilate I guess was the word back then. And as the communities grew larger, they would certain rights that they would assert. So when you think about Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech in 1969, he warned that in 15 to 20 years the black man would have the whip hand over the white man and he was the MP for Walva Hampton which had a growing Punjabi seek community. During that time there was a dispute on the buses for the right for Punjabi seeks to wear a turban on the buses and this is one of the things he cites and says these people are taking liberties here. They're advocating for their religious rights and this is a problem. And so there was all this hyperbole back then and you see a lot of it today when it comes to the Muslim community. But it's age-old as well. If you think about the Jewish community in East London in White Chapel, you can go through newspaper reports from the early 20th century and they will talk about these people living parallel lives, refusing to integrate, being a problem, being hostile to the majority. And it's the same rhetoric they use today about the Muslim community in White Chapel and Tower Hamlets. I've always believed that we need to work to bring communities together. I have my own critiques of state multiculturalism. I believe in working-class unity. I believe that if we have racial segregation in Britain, that's a problem. I want us to get to know each other. But there are many historic factors that led to racial segregation in Britain. So, for example, Luton is often cited by Tommy Robinson as a place that's extremely divided. I've never felt that there was lots of hostility between communities, but I've understood that when my dad was growing up, there were certain areas where you were less likely to be racially abused. There were certain estates that you wouldn't want to live because you would regularly get your window smashed. And so, migrant communities congregated together. They also went where the work was in the inner city areas. lots of people who achieved a degree of social mobility or wanted to escape for instance the slum housing of East London in the 70s they ended up moving to the suburbs and the new towns and so yes maybe there were some people who didn't like the newcomers and moved out of anger but some of them had better quality lives to live in Canada and Australia when we talk about migration we don't talk about immigration to all of these countries so lots of white working-class people have also moved as well and a friend of mine often says you know we never told anyone to leave that area. We came in, >> we were part of the same industries, we worked in the same jobs and people moved out. >> There's also the convenience. If you're a Muslim who needs access to halal meat or you want to go to a local mosque, you're going to live in an area that caters to your needs. If you live in an area where all the pubs are closing down and you want a nice Friday night out, you might want to live in an area that has those facilities. That isn't driven by hatred. >> Immigration is sort of the top, I suppose, cost of living and immigration, the two top issues in the country. And there are sort of two responses when it comes to I suppose how that impacts on race relations which is one is to say these these questions are the same. You know what's driving anti-immigrant sentiment is um racism and therefore to defend our multicultural society. What we have to do is defend um the right to migration and sort of oppose any any restrictions. The other response which I suppose is articulated by Shabbalammude is to say we have to separate immigration politics from race politics say that um preferences about immigration you know can be expressed and politicians should respond to them. Um but we should have a sort of taboo and uh a sort of red line I suppose when it comes to any questioning about a multithnic society. You got obviously restore on the one side saying no actually let's do ethnationalism again. I suppose what do you what do you think about those two things? Would you go for the one route or the other or somewhere in between? >> I think before we go into any of this, we have to look at the underlying economic concerns people have. So when people complain about immigration, they often say, "What about our own?" And this is a very easy narrative to sell, right? They don't care about us as white working-class people because they care about those people over there. Look at those asylum seekers in their fancy hotels. And my argument's often been that no, they don't care about you, but they don't care about those guys either. And we have to address the economic side of this. We have housing shortages in Britain. We've not built enough social housing since the 1950s. We have huge vacancies in adult social care. We've not invested enough in adult social care. We pay people poor wages. The average age of a construction worker in Britain is about 50. And we're going to have a huge recruitment crisis in construction. we've not invested enough in skills and training and apprenticeships for young people in this country. So they are going to start recruiting from abroad. And this was the narrative in the 50s and 60s that we want your labor but we don't want your presence. And so I think politicians have to ask serious questions around if you are going to claim you want to reduce migration because you want to priorit prioritize the British people. Are you really prioritizing the British people? In what way are you investing in workingclass communities? If you go through my town center today, the most common site is going to be betting shops. It's going to be poverty. It's going to be people in severe hardship. Lots of those people will be white working-class people and they've got nothing. You go to County Durham and you go to the former pit villages, places where reform are surging and you see deprivation and despair. And so the narrative around migration is an easy one to sell. There's not loads of migrants in County Durham. So why are people talking about stop the boats? There's no boats arriving there. There's not loads of asylum seekers there. Luton and diverse towns like mine have way more migration than other places and we're all just trying to make it. You know, we also have to look at this in the international context. There is the history of colonialism. There is going to be the impact of the climate crisis as long as we have global inequality, as long as we have instability around the world. We are going to have migration and people are going to try to, you know, feed their kids and they're no different to any of us. Taj Ali, your new book, Come What May, We're Here to Stay, um is out this week. Thank you so much for joining us on Nvar Media. >> Thanks for having me. >> [music]