Politics

Why Britain is the Pakistan of Europe

Nirpal DhaliwalNovember 1, 2016 | 12:15 IST

Sixty-nine years after separating from India, a rogue nation with an increasingly backward-looking and Islamist population lives in hostility with its neighbours, pursuing a primitive fantasy of monocultural isolation.

I am, of course, referring to the British who are, today, the Pakistanis of Europe.

Having cynically encouraged Muslim separatism to undermine India's independence movement, it is a great irony that the UK so clearly mirrors the Land Of The Pure now that it has achieved its own Partition via the Brexit referendum.

Both states are artificial constructs well past expiry, fractured by secessionist forces as the Scots and the Balochis inch towards freedom. Minorities live in fear in both - racist attacks are now regular in Britain - steeped as they are in deluded notions of exceptionalism and a brainless pining for past empires.

The loss of the Raj hurts the British as much as the decline of the Mughals does Pakistan. Both nations exist in retrospect, unable to conceive of the world and future other than through a nostalgic projection of the past.

These simple mono-dimensional peoples have together enjoyed an easy historic rapport while, unable to fathom the depth and complexity of India, have treated her with condescension and suspicion. For decades after 1947, the British expected their fellow monotheists to wholly surpass the incomprehensible and seemingly disparate pagans of Hindustan.

Without imperial glory to boost their esteem and give them an identity, these twin societies now increasingly seek shape and comfort in conservative Islam.

British women flock to the faith to escape the boozy menopausal despair that consumes so many in an inebriated culture in which gender-relations have disintegrated and family breakdown is the norm, finding structure and purpose in following the Sharia under the firm supervision of a Muslim husband.

Among Britain's rapidly growing three-million-strong Muslim population - that has doubled in merely a decade - there is a rising incidence of desert traditions: burkas, polygamy and triple talaq, forced marriages and, of course, jihadism. The spiritual and demographic destiny of post-Brexit Britain is not an independent Anglo-Saxon resurgence but, more likely, a political and economic union with Pakistan - its soulmate among nations.

Since the 1990s, the two countries have been major contributors to the jihadi cause. A thousand Brits are believed to have joined ISIS. With 60-times more Muslims, India has sent them only 23.

UK PM Theresa May will be in India soon. (Photo credit: India Today) 

British intelligence admitted that 4,000 UK citizens went to fight with the Taliban, while not one of India's 180 million Muslims was among those foreign jihadis captured by NATO, despite their country being a comparative stone's throw from Afghanistan. This high-concentrate fanaticism is proof that Britain, like Pakistan, poses a far graver danger to the civilised world than India ever will.

Britain's emulation of Pakistan is so profound that neurotic Pakistani anti-semitism is mainstream politics here. The Labour Party, beholden to the Pakistani bloc-vote, has nurtured anti-Jewish sentiments for years, and Labour politicians of Pakistani extraction make the same lunatic claims about Jews as the rabid illiterate imbeciles who gather for ISI-staged rallies in Rawalpindi.

This week, Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister, will visit India. Given this present state of affairs and the boggy no-man's-land Britain finds itself in, having declared a Brexit but not yet executed it, India should treat the British in a new way: that is, like Pakistanis.

As Indians know, the Pakistani state responds most productively to muscular diplomacy laced with a healthy dose of contempt. Any extension of respect is taken as weakness and exploited.

The British are the same.

Now that India's polity is no longer the preserve of Doon and Mayo types with a colonial affinity with Britain, it is time to emulate the Chinese, American and the EU's stony disdain for this declining power. Future trade deals, support for a permanent seat on the Security Council, and a host of other useful ends can be met by simply regarding the British with some derision.

The British love being looked down on. They are, by nature, a servile people still clinging to a medieval social order that is lorded over by a monarchy. Their Upper House is not only unelected but substantially hereditary.

One only has to watch ten minutes of Downton Abbey to know the subservient masochistic bliss they derive from keeping to their allotted place in the hierarchy while relishing their superiors' haughty disgust for them.

Like its Pakistani soulmate, British democracy is merely a camouflage for feudalism. And the myriad unspoken codes and etiquettes of its class-system - ignorance of which exposes one's rank and risks humiliation - exist simply to enable the British to savour every expression of contempt imagineable.

Contempt is Britain's lifeblood: it flows from the throne downwards, to be eagerly lapped up and added to by those in each tier below. This is why immigrants are so disliked in the UK: their ambition and individualism challenges the painfully constipated status quo, filling the Brits with with shame and terror as they sense how far history has accelerated away from them.

Like Pakistan, Britain is a self-loathing nation whose reality falls far short of its estimation of itself: psychologically this makes them a people who cannot respect those who show them respect. And, odd as it might feel after nearly 70 years of being respectful, Indians too should adopt the hauteur with which President Barack Obama addresses the British.

He not only explicitly told them to not vote for Brexit but has since poured scorn on their "mistake" and scolded them for disobeying him. Patronising the British has, for decades, been an unshakeable pillar of American foreign policy, and has done much to prevent Brexit being enacted so far.

Throughout his visit to the UK last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping wore an expression of disgusted boredom as the British fawned and left no expense spared to give him a pomp-filled state visit that included carriage rides with the Queen and a lavish banquet at which he seemed to be asleep. Her Majesty was later recorded bitching about the extreme rudeness of the Chinese entourage who made inordinate demands of their hosts.

This outright contempt won China a fat slice of the UK electricity sector: the nuclear reactor they will build will allow the Chinese to milk the British public for untold billions of pounds for decades to come.

And now the EU is giving the Brits a tight slap on a daily basis, as one European leader or other declares how brutally they will hardball them during Brexit negotiations. A price of £25 billion has been quoted simply as the fee for leaving.

And should Britain depart, it will then have to strike a trade deal with a global economic superpower with a GDP seven-times larger than its own: not a fair fight. With only two years to agree one, the Europeans only have to let the timer run out and the British will sign any last-minute offer that is thrown at them.

The Japanese have also joined in the browbeating. Their government issued a humiliating list of demands the UK must meet if Japanese investment is to continue after Brexit, while Nissan hinted at leaving the country should its profits be damaged. The British government has given the necessary assurances and the carmaker is staying put - for now.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has begun India's long-overdue self-assertion in the world. His nationalist government pays, quite rightly, less lip-service to the history India shares with Britain than any before, and should now be even bolder in muscling the British into assisting India's ambitions.

Britain's position in the world is a joke. Russia sailed an aircraft carrier through the English Channel recently merely to insult them. The days when the British came to India and styled themselves as grand "white Mughals" are long gone, and Indian interests are now best served by treating the Brits like the ridiculous white Pakis they are today.

Also read: Theresa May can help Britain save face after Brexit

 

Last updated: November 01, 2016 | 20:55
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