On Friday, 28 June 2024, Asian Voice in collaboration with the City Hindus Network and the City Sikhs, held a political hustings for the run-up to the UK General Election. The panel consisted of Anneliese Dodds (Labour), Felicity Buchan (Conservative), Lord Christopher Fox (Lib Dems) and Dr Pallavi Devulapalli (Greens), where they were questioned on several topics impacting the Sikh and Hindu community, including the NHS, growing Sikhphobia and taxation. When a member of the audience posed a question to Anneliese Dodds on the presence of MPs in the Labour Party who hold anti-Hindu/anti-India views, the Chair of the Labour Party responded that she was ‘unaware’ of any such views. Annaliese Dodds’s response promoted sharp criticism from the audience.
Over previous years, there have been a number of Labour MPs who have expressed anti-India/anti-Hindu and in some cases overtly Hinduphobic views. In 2019 days after India annulled article 370 Liam Byrne (then MP for Hodge Hill Birmingham) was one of several Labour MPs who came out to condemn India and took a pro-Pakistan stance on the Kashmir issue, failing to discuss the plight of Hindus and other minorities in the region. Liam participated in a pro-Pakistan protest outside the India embassy in London which turned violent and aggressive. In 2020, the APPG for Kashmir received £33k from the Pakistan Government for a trip Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir (‘POJK’) and subsequently MPs from Labour Friends of Kashmir; Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish), Sam Tarry (Ilford South) and Naz Shah (Bradford West) visited POJK to discuss “human rights abuses by India”. Sam Tarry was also involved in making false accusations against Sadhvi Ritamabarji whose planned trip to the UK in 2022 was targeted by Islamists which culminated in the attack on the Durga Bhawan temple in Birmingham.
In 2022, the Labour Mayor of Leicester, Peter Soulsby, deselected Hindu Councillors in the city and replaced them with Sikh MPs from outside the city. Peter Soulsby also with Majid Freeman, one of the key instigators of the Leicester riots who blamed Hindus for the riots, a statement which Peter publicly supported.
In 2021, the local election in Batley and Spen was marred with anti-India rhetoric and local Labour MP Kim Leadbeater upon pressure from a local Islamic group wrote to the Home Secretary to blame Leicester riots on ‘Hindutva’. In 2021, the Labour MP from Birmingham Preet Kaur Gill made a series of provocative tweets where she falsely referred to an unidentified man involved in an altercation in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab as being a Hindu ‘Hindu terrorist’.
On the same evening of 28th June, Keir Starmer on a visit to the Swaminarayan Mandir in Kingsbury talked about there being no place for Hinduphobia in the UK and his desire to build a strategic partnership with India. Given Labour’s recent history, members of the British Hindu community are questioning how genuine these statements by Kier Starmer are.