shiv wrote:All that I am saying is that it was patently obvious to Indians (and not a few Brits) in the 1980s that Pakistanis were already a different species - but Britain had not developed a word to describe them beyond "Asian" which clubbed all Indians, Packees and Bangladeshis together.
That was my point precisely - things only really started to change in the 1980s.
There is a reason for that. Many of the immigrant generation were either born before or just after partition, and although the Islamisation process had begun it simply hadnt gone that far yet.
If you go to places like South Africa, or the Caribbean where Muslim Punjabis emigrated from places that became Pakistan before the Pakistan Movement you will see much the same kind of thing, except that they've lost close family ties to Pakistan because they emmigrated generations before cheap jet travel. In those places Indians are Indians to the rest, despite all the myriad internal communal divisions.
Nobody wanted to believe any Indians because they were the oppressors of Muslims anyway and could be expected to speak ill of Muslims in secular Britain. If an Indian wanted to be a good Brit he had to shut up and not talk ill of Pakis. Pakis on the other hand were free to speak of Indian/Hindu oppression of Kashmiris/Muslims. That was the climate in Britain.
Once again, the idea of foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s by immigrants of any sort seemed far fetched. It just didnt happen - people were busy building lives and making a little money.
Pakjabi Political advocacy really only began after the Rushdie affair in 1989 and grew through the 1990s, after the Cold War rather than during it.
The people who were the first to warn of the rise of Islamism in the 1990s were 'Asian' Muslims, usually writers shocked by the change - Salman Rushdie himself after the Satanic Verses, and Hanif Kureishi who wrote the book (and later film) "My Son the Fanatic", which authentically captures some of those generational changes. Ayub Khan-Din wrote the play, and later film "East is East", and there were a number of others as well.
All of these films and books did quite well, but in the end what matters are votes, just like India, or any other democracy. The self-ghettoisation of Mirpuris, the largest segment of Pakistani immigrants created natural vote banks, and once these groups discovered their willingness and ability to use that power things changed.
The ones making noise about Kashmir were overwhelmingly Mirpuris from 'Azad Kashmir'. The bottom line is that they cared enough (with the encouragement of the Pakistani embassy) to organise and put their message out there to journalists, and demand action from Local Councillors to all the way up to MPs. It was a lot of work, and clearly a lot of people showed up to do it.
There's nothing that stopped people of Indian origin from doing the same thing - except that most of them had better things to do with their time. Those who were politically and socially active were far more likely to fight racism, and they did it shoulder to shoulder with Muslims of Subcontinental origin, blacks and whites. They were generally secular people, far from keen on emphasising racial and religious lines between minorities in what they saw as a fight against the majority's entrenched prejudices. I dont think its an accident that the head of Liberty (the British ACLU for the Americans out there) is Shami Chakrabarti, and she spends a lot of her time fighting the government.
If you dont think that grassroots activism that opposes a government line cant have an impact, then you should look at what the anti-apartheid movement did in the UK in the 1980s. Peter Gabriel wasnt out there singing for Kashmir.
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