Farrukh Dhondy | Peddlers of hate & some with violent mental disorders trigger UK attacks

Such beliefs are but a spectre, a wraith

On what is evident reality

O Bachchoo, marvel at mud breeding leaves

Which nurture the creature who now conceives

How, but not why we have come to be!”

From Songs Of The Zoom Mela, by Bachchoo

In my short and happy life I’ve been on demonstrations galore, but never in a real riot, even though I was arrested once in what the police labelled as such.

This was in 1978 and the largely Asian workers of a photo-processing factory called Grunwick demanded the right to unionise and were sacked. I, as a member of the political-activist collective called Race Today, went to the gates of Grunwick on a day when thousands of miners from the National Union of Miners (NUM) descended from northern English towns to support the trade unionisation. We confronted the police, who were there to support the “scab” workers being taken by bus through the gates.

When the leader of the NUM, one Arthur Scargill, was arrested, hell broke loose. The police moved in a cordon onto the demonstrators. I was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and dragged to a police van.

In court, weeks later, accused of assaulting three policemen, I defended myself asking my police “victims” how tall and how heavy each of them was. I also asked them to estimate my size and weight. The cops in the gallery couldn’t help laughing. The judge let me off with a warning not to return to Grunwick.

I left triumphantly, accompanied by my Race Today colleagues and my sari-clad mother, who was visiting from Jamshedpur. She attended court anxiously, having asked why I’d got involved with the police. I said: “Mum, you wouldn’t have asked Mahatma ji why he was leading the satyagraha, would you?”

And then there were the riots in Brixton in South London in 1981. I got a phone call at night saying riots had broken out. Black youngsters were fighting the police and smashing and looting the shops on the High Street. Brixton was where the Race Today offices were located, and I hastily drove down there, was blocked by the police barriers, parked and walked.

There were shouts and chaos all round as I reached and entered Race Today’s office. People were running either towards or away from the “action”. My colleagues told me that the riot began with a dispute between black youths and the police over an evidently unjust arrest. The Brixton police were notorious for “stopping and searching” any black person walking the streets and even planting weapons and drugs on them when they found nothing. The riot was certainly a reaction against the record of police racism.

It spilt over into the looting of shops by some taking advantage; and while I absolutely supported the youth in their antagonism to police racism, I don’t wear designer shoes like NIKE or others and so generously determined I wouldn’t join in the looting.

And, gentle reader, there was a third much earlier involvement in a “riot”: this was the disturbance or event in 1968, characterised in some newspapers as a riot, when I, along with friends, turned up outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square to protest against the unjust invasion of Vietnam. The police rode into our protest on horses. I joined arms with Vivan Sundaram and dodged the cop cavalry which was brutally knocking down some of the protesters. Riot? On the part of the the police? Maybe!

I have to say my convictions on trade union rights took me to Grunwick. And still, the battle for those rights goes on all over the world. The South African-born American, a billionaire called Elon Musk, appeared on X, the media platform he owns, with Donald Trump. Mr Trump praised Mr Musk for attacking unions and sacking any employee who dares to strike. Mr Musk smiled.

This same fellow has in the past weeks filled his platform with messages declaring that Europe is on the brink of “civil war”. Throughout this nonsensical assertion, he and some openly “fascist” contributors posted memes and messages provoking right-wingers to attack immigrants seeking refuge as well as mosques and Muslims.

They succeeded in provoking riots in several British cities where attempts were made to set fire to mosques and hotels housing refugees. The police, though pelted with bricks and burning projectiles, contained the riots easily and arrested hundreds of these thugs.

Two recent occurrences, and perhaps a potential third, were used by the provocateurs. In Southgate, a 17-year-old British-born youth, son of Rwandan refugees, ruthlessly murdered three very young children in a dance class. In Nottingham last year, Valdo Calocane, a 32-year-old black man, randomly killed two young students and a middle-aged school caretaker and attempted to run over three more pedestrians in his van.

And this week Ioan Pintaru, a Romanian homeless man, had stabbed an 11-year-old girl and her mother, both tourists visiting Leicester Square. A security guard called Abdullah heard the girl screaming and tackled Pintaru, saving the girl’s life, though she had been stabbed eight times.

I have no doubt that the X-and-other-instigative-maniacs who have used their memes and messages to vilify all immigrants as knife-wielding murderers, will home in on Pintaru being a Romanian refugee.

It is plain as daylight that all three killers were not motivated by their “immigrant” or “non-white” status, but by severe, even certified, violent mental disorder.

Yes Bad -- because Mad -- (if one is still allowed to use the term)!