Due to widespread Anglophilia, there is a benign image of Britain with memes like “the sceptr’d isle”, “home of Shakespeare, the Knights of the Round Table”, “Oh, to be in England now that spring is in the air!”, the Battle of Britain” and so on. But is the reality a little different? The experiences of three women there recently suggest that something is not right. Racism, bigotry, and vicious intolerance against women are common, especially if they are non-white.
The three are Rashmi Samant, a young Indian graduate student at Oxford, who was bullied and canceled essentially because she’s a brown Hindu; Meghan Markle, an American who married into the British royal family and complains of intolerance and racism against her because of her part-black ancestry; and Sarah Everard, a 30-year-old Londoner who was abducted and murdered, possibly by a police officer, while walking home one night.
Rashmi Samant, studying engineering, was elected by a record margin as the president of the Oxford student union: the first Indian woman to do so. What followed was vicious online trolling and bullying (in which, sadly, Indian-origin faculty took part) to humiliate her based on allegedly anti-Jew and anti-East Asian comments by her which they dug up from her social media accounts from years ago. To the impartial observer, these comments don’t seem nasty, only slightly tasteless: normal for a 17-year-old.
The reality, though, was inadvertently exposed by Abhijit Sarkar, the post-doc faculty whose involvement in the lynch mob is inexcusable. He said, “Oxford student union is not ready for a ‘Sanatani’ president”. In other words, there was a religious bias behind the attack on her, and it was specifically because she is a Hindu. We can imagine what is behind this religious bigotry, but worryingly, Oxford and Sarkar have offered neither explanation nor apology.
In the meantime, Rashmi felt forced to resign from her student union presidency, and, possibly fearing physical assaults on her, a lone young woman in an alien country, she has returned to her native Udipi in Karnataka. Let us remember that in 1976, a brown Pakistani Muslim woman, Benazir Bhutto, had been elected president of the same student union. A clear indication that racial and religious animosity has become far worse since then?
The revered royal family of Britain has many skeletons in its closet, and it may be a dangerous place for women. We remember the sad, brutal, and mysterious death of Princess Diana (and her apparently miserable life too, and rumors of affairs). Her son, Prince Harry, is obviously dominated by his upwardly mobile, commoner wife, Meghan Markle, but her explanation that she was hounded and humiliated for her black ancestry may not be untrue.
A Charlie Hebdo cartoon captured it perfectly, situating it in the context of the murder of George Floyd (black) by a policeman (white) choking him with his knee in Minneapolis last year. A rude (as usual for the magazine) but insightful perspective. Meghan too couldn’t breathe?
Sarah Everard’s case is obviously the most tragic. Her disappearance and murder have provoked a national outcry in Britain. The police were also brutal in breaking up the protest by women: there were viral images of a red-headed woman, a student named Patsy Stevenson, being pinned to the ground roughly, according to her for doing nothing more than being a bystander.
Britain’s police have a nice friendly image, with the unarmed bobby saying, “Now, now, what’s all this then?”, but maybe this is passe. There have been longstanding accusations of incompetence, for instance regarding the grooming cases of Rotherham, where hundreds of young white girls were turned into sex slaves and prostitutes by Pakistani-Britons.
But the accusation of police involvement in Sarah’s abduction and murder is more serious. I think it’s time the BBC, which assumes the air of being the world’s conscience keeper, did a penetrating investigation into what ails Scotland Yard, the home of the British police.
I suggest Israeli-British filmmaker Leslie Udwin be pressed into service to make an in-depth film “Britain's Daughters” to understand what ails women there. She was quick to make the accusatory “India’s Daughter” that blamed the Jyoti Singh Pandey murder on India’s religion, culture, and ethics: quite the hatchet job. I thought it was a vile, poisonous film then, and said as much.
My hunch is that Sarah Everard’s murder (and the bullying of Meghan Markle and Rashmi Samant) has everything to with Abrahamic patriarchy, notions of the inferiority of women and non-whites, an old-boy culture that tolerates bigotry and insensitivity, and an insularity sharpened by Brexit.
And that’s not all. Leicester University, which I understand is rather well-thought-of, has an official toolkit on student sex work. (h/t to Bimal Trivedi for finding this). As much as you spin it as benign recognition of diversity, and even if it is not gender-specific, this is a smoking gun: it suggests that young women are far more at risk in the leafy halls of academia than we assume.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is due to visit India shortly. He’s a rather decent sort, but he should be grilled mercilessly about the Rashmi Samant case. He is coming as a supplicant, as post-Brexit Britain needs trade with India more badly than vice versa. Nothing less than the dismissal of Abhijit Sarkar, and the censuring of lax Oxford officials should be considered satisfactory. It is a legitimate expression of concern for Indian citizens and women and minority populations in Britain.
Episode 20: Britain's Daughters: are women safe there?