During the last 14 years of Conservative rule, anti-immigrant feelings have been ratcheted up significantly by politicians and the media. Parties like the UK Independence Party led by Nigel Farage openly campaigned against immigrants. Photo: iStock
Why South Asians, especially Sikhs, are living in constant fear in the UK
Two horrific racially-aggravated rapes and assaults on Sikh taxi drivers have instilled fear in South Asian communities; anti-immigrant political rhetoric blamed
After a series of racially-motivated attacks on Sikhs in central England in recent weeks, South Asian communities across the UK, be they Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, are living in fear that they will be the next to be targeted.
The scapegoating of immigrants by right-wing politicians and media has led to the rise of racism in recent years, a scourge that many thought was left behind in the last century.
On the morning of September 9, a young Sikh woman was sexually assaulted as she walked to work in the Oldbury area of Birmingham. The British-born victim in her 20s said her assailants hurled racist abuse at her even as they were attacking and raping her. The most common abuse that white racists use for South Asians is ‘Paki’ – a term which like the word ‘Nigger’ hurled at black people has officially been banned as an abuse.
A man in his 30s was initially arrested for the assault and on October 20, a 49-year-old man and a 65-year-old woman were arrested and charged with two counts of rape. All three of the accused are white.
More recently, another young Sikh woman was found in distress on the streets of Walsall, a town close to Birmingham, on the evening of October 25. She alleged that she had been raped and assaulted at a nearby property. A 32-year-old white British man, John Ashby has been arrested and charged with rape, strangulation, religiously or racially aggravated assault and theft of jewellery and mobile phone.
Racial attacks on South Asians
Between these two horrific incidents there have also been racially aggravated assaults on a couple of elderly Sikh taxi drivers in Wolverhampton, a city near Birmingham. All of these incidents have happened in the space of two months and they have instilled fear in minority communities, particularly Sikhs, living in the area known as West Midlands.
Many of the cities in the Midlands like Birmingham, Manchester, Coventry, Wolverhampton have large South Asian communities who have settled there for decades and lived peacefully side by side with white Britons. In fact, Sikhs and Pakistani and Indian Muslims moved to the Midlands as far back as the 1960s to work in the factories.
The towns and cities here are now home to third and fourth generation immigrants from South Asia who have flourishing businesses, joined all professions and have contributed hugely to the regeneration of the region.
Preet Kaur Gill, the Labour Member of Parliament for Birmingham Edgbaston, who is Sikh herself said she was shocked by the two racially aggravated rapes and that it was “not something I ever thought we would see in modern Britian today”.
Political rhetoric ramps up
The Indian Workers Association (Great Britain) has directly blamed political rhetoric that scapegoats immigrants for the sharp increase in hate crimes. The IWA (GB), founded in 1938 in the Midlands to support India’s independence movement, called the attacks symptomatic of the worsening climate for minority and immigrant communities across the country.
After the recent spate of attacks, Sikh legislators and the Sikh Federation are demanding that anti-Sikh crimes are recorded as a separate category so that the true extent of how the different communities are affected can be seen.
After the race riots of the 1970s and 1980s when South Asians fought alongside Black Britons of African and West Indian descent against racism, the 1990s saw the rise of confident multiculturalism in British society where minority communities were able to feel they belonged to the country that their parents had chosen to migrate to.
The new millennium and 9/11 saw the rise of Islamophobia in British society along with the rest of the western world and hate crimes against Muslims grew sharply. But bigotry is blind and Sikhs because of their turbans often got mistaken for Muslims and were also at the receiving end of hate crimes.
During the last 14 years of Conservative rule, anti-immigrant feelings have been ratcheted up significantly by politicians and the media. Parties like the UK Independence Party led by Nigel Farage openly campaigned against immigrants. The Brexit referendum was ostensibly fought on the basis of coming out of the European Union and taking back control, but that was just a fig leaf for the real plank of stopping immigration and sending East European migrants back home.
Rise of Reform party
With the surprising victory for Brexit, the far-right parties got a fillip and they regrouped under a new party – Reform – again led by Nigel Farage, and turned their attention to refugees and economic migrants coming to the UK from Africa, West Asia and South Asia. Desperate not to lose its new found appeal among the white working-class voters, in erstwhile Labour constituencies, Boris Johnson as prime minister jumped on to the anti-immigrant bandwagon.
However, thanks to ‘Partygate’, Johnson’s bad behaviour during the Covid pandemic, he was forced to step down as Prime Minister in 2022. During the next two years before the general election in 2024, subsequent Conservative Prime Ministers continued to focus on immigration and ‘stopping the boats’ hoping it would save them at the election and their core voters would ignore the mess they had made with the party, but it was not to be.
The Tories loss was Reform’s gain. Though the Labour Party had a landslide victory in the 2024 election, the real win was for Reform which for the first time managed to get five of their leaders elected to the House of Commons including Nigel Farage. The electoral rise of Reform has emboldened neo-Nazi groups like the National Front and the English Defence League which spew racist venom and cause division among communities.
Muslims are the number one target of racist attacks but Sikhs feel they are the second most targeted community.
In fact, on September 12, just a few days after the rape of the young woman in Oldbury, the English Defence League held a massive rally called ‘Unite the Kingdom’ in the heart of London where shockingly around one and half lakh people turned up. This was the largest far-right rally till date in the UK and it sent shivers down the spine of minority communities.
While EDL’s leader Tommy Robinson spews hatred mostly at Muslims but for racists all brown people are ‘Pakis’.
Sikhs targeted
During the year April 2024 till March 2025, there were 70,000 racially aggravated hate crimes recorded around the UK.
Muslims are the number one target of racist attacks but Sikhs feel they are the second most targeted community. Sikhs are not listed as a distinct category in these statistics and therefore there are no actual figures for anti-Sikh hate crimes as they are added to either the Hindu or Indian categories.
After the recent spate of attacks, Sikh legislators and the Sikh Federation are demanding that anti-Sikh crimes are recorded as a separate category so that the true extent of how the different communities are affected can be seen. Sikhs feel they have become invisible.
“We find the government (UK) is just silent on the issue in terms of it doesn’t even recognise anti-Sikh hate," said Dabinderjit Singh, from the Sikh Federation UK.
Sikhs also feel let down by the Indian government. Despite being categorised as part of Hindu or Indian ethnicity, the Indian High Commission does not speak up for them when they suffer hate crimes unlike when Hindus are attacked.
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