Author: Nick Lowles | Date: February 2002

Sleeping with the enemy: Griffin ponders black membership

The British National Party is considering allowing black and Asian people into its ranks. Nick Griffin, the party leader, told a regional newspaper last month that he is contemplating ripping up the party rulebook, which at present disqualifies those without direct British or European ancestry from party membership.

A hint of non-white membership comes as Griffin continues to court rogue figures within the Sikh and Hindu communities in a bid to isolate Muslims and portray the BNP in a more respectable light.

On the party website, he claims to be “bringing together white Britons, Sikhs and Hindus, in a common effort to expose and resist the innate aggression of the imperialistic ideology of Islam. Yet again, we give the lie to those who fanatically claim that we are ‘racists’ or ‘haters’.”

As if to prove his sincerity, he has recently been depicted in the Birmingham-based Sunday Mercury shaking hands with a west London Sikh, who goes by the name of Ammo Singh. However, because of the Londoner’s desire to remain anonymous, only their hands were photographed!

Singh is obviously worried about the reaction within his own community in Southall if news that he is dallying with nazis were to be revealed. Last July, he was interviewed on Radio Four’s Today programme, extolling the virtues of the BNP. On that occasion his voice was distorted to prevent recognition. His links with Sikh extremist groups did not seem to concern the BBC journalist, a man who boasts about being the most hated Asian in the Corporation.

Searchlight is less shackled by Singh’s wishes and is happy to reproduce his picture.

Singh and Griffin orchestrated the handshake stunt together. Singh contacted the journalist from the Sunday Mercury and told him that he was introducing Griffin to Sikhs in Walsall. The two men also worked together in an attempt to hoodwink a Panorama team into believing that large numbers of Sikhs and Hindus supported BNP policy. Emails between Griffin and Singh, reproduced on the BNP website, show the level of cooperation.

The Mercury article followed the release of an anti-Islam audiocassette by the BNP. Entitled: Islam – A threat to us all, the tape contains speeches by Griffin, a Hindu and a Sikh.

The Sikh contributor calls for the BNP to be applauded. “Women are forced into oblivion and the men get high, very high, on doing to secularism what the Taleban did to the two Buddhist statues in Bamiyan. The Muslim extremists now plan to turn Britain into an Islamic republic, like Libya, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, by 2025, using a combination of immigration, high birth rate and conversion.

“Who will stop them and save the rest of us?” he asks. “Ironically, the party labelled by the media as ‘the Nazis’. Therefore, let us join to salute the British National Party.”

The tape contains several spurious claims, not least that British Muslims are secretly plotting to kidnap, drug and seduce non-Muslim women and spirit them abroad into prostitution. This is a recurring theme for Sikh extremist groups, such as the Shere-e-Punjab, but does not stand up to investigation. During the making of last November’s Panorama programme, Mr Singh was repeatedly asked to provide proof of this claim but none was forthcoming.

The tape claims that the contributors are “leading members of the Sikh and Hindu communities”, but this is far from the truth. Singh and his mates represent a few fanatical anti-Muslim supporters. Every time Griffin has approached Hindu and Sikh community leaders he has been given short shrift. Such was his reception when he attempted to write a joint anti-Muslim statement with Hasmukh Shah, a Hindu businessman whose property reportedly suffered more than half a million pounds worth of damage during the Bradford riots.

Singh claims the support of 100 Sikhs and Hindus, variously in west London, the East Midlands and the West Midlands. While this is an exaggeration, he and his friends do have links with two fanatically extreme religious groups, the Hindu nationalist Arya Samaj Movement, based in Birmingham, and the Sikh Shere-e-Punjab.

The tape is the latest chapter in the BNP’s campaign against Islam, which began after the summer riots in Oldham and Bradford, but intensified after the terrorist attacks of 11 September. In October, activists handed out anti-Islamic leaflets outside Canterbury and York cathedrals. Jay Lee, a BNP activist in Bexley, even adorned a priest’s outfit for the occasion. Before Christmas, Griffin joined a BNP protest outside Parliament.

Griffin seems prepared to go to any lengths to help divest the party of its racist tag. “I can see a time,” he told the Sunday Mercury, “when black and brown faces will be admitted into the BNP fold but we would have to be careful that we do not get to the stage where they outnumber the indigenous white members”.

Singh is obviously delighted by this news. “We are still at the initial stage in our cooperation with the BNP. I am not seeking to officially join the BNP but I would seriously think about it if the opportunity arose.”

This news will horrify most BNP members, many of whom are already perturbed by the existence of the party’s Ethnic Liaison Committee and the admission into party membership of Lawrence Rustem, who is half-Turkish.

Some in the party already viewed these developments as the first step towards allowing non-whites to join the organisation. Their fears seem to have been confirmed in the newspaper article. Any links with Shere-e-Punjab and the Arya Samaj Movement will cause further alarm.

In reality, it is unlikely that the BNP will allow non-whites to join. In the same article, Griffin reveals his true motives behind the links with Singh and his mates. The motive for such a move, he explains, would be “because people would believe us when we say we are not racists”.

As with much recent BNP activity under Griffin, this is no more than a stunt to legitimise the party’s racism.

For the time being Singh is flavour of the month. He is a gullible fool, motivated by his own religious prejudices, being led by Griffin for short-term political capital. Griffin and the BNP want an all-white Britain and if that means using people like Singh to achieve political respectability then so be it.

Let us just hope that Singh does not go the same way as Rushton. Shortly after being paraded as the party’s first Turkish member, another BNP member beat him up.

Nick Griffin’s religious extremist friends

The British National Party claims to be negotiating with “leading” members of the Sikh and Hindu communities. The opposite is true. Last month Nick Griffin met representatives of two extremist religious organisations, the Shere-e-Punjab and Arya Samaj Movement.

Shere-e-Punjab

Shere-e-Punjab, the Lions of Punjab, was formed in Handsworth, Birmingham, in the mid-1980s, in response to growing street crime aimed at Asians. It quickly developed an anti-Muslim agenda, exploiting historical divisions between the two communities.

Branches now exist in the West Midlands, west and east London, Slough and Derby.

Much of its propaganda is based on claims that Sikh girls are being picked up by Muslim boys and converted to Islam. Other leaflets assert that Sikh girls are being drugged and spirited away to Pakistan and forced into prostitution. While there were a few publicised cases of this in the late 1980s, no one has been able to prove that these were anything other than isolated incidents or that it is still going on.

In 1997 Shere-e-Punjab was pivotal to the disturbances in Slough. Tensions that had been rising between Muslim and Sikh youths in west London for several years erupted into a national crisis at Hounslow College. Individual fights over girlfriends and personal feuds attracted outside extremists. Some Sikh students, wanting muscle, called in Shere-e-Punjab in response to the emergence of Islamic fundamentalists at the college.

Police were called after a 50-strong Muslim gang gathered outside the college gates and threatened non-Muslim students.

Shere-e-Punjab decided to retaliate and, mobilising their forces nationally, descended on the heavily Muslim Chalvey estate in Slough. In April 1997, an 80-strong gang of its activists rampaged through the estate in a convoy of cars, flying Sikh nationalist flags. Cars and property were damaged.

The violence came to a head as Shere-e-Punjab extremists attempted to clash with their Muslim counterparts a few weeks later. The Muslim festival of Eid fell on the same day as the Sikh festival of Visakhi. Only a large police presence prevented major disorder. Almost 90 arrests were made, many for possession of offensive weapons.

Arya Samaj Movement

This group was founded in 1875 by Dayanand Sarasvati, an Indian religious reformer and bigoted anti-Islamist. He was a leading figure in the 19th century Hindu revival that placed exclusive authority in the Vedas. The Arya Samaj Movement establishes Anglo Vaidic schools to raise Hindu militants.

Ironically, given its present links with Ammo Singh and the BNP, the group has been violently hostile to Sikhs.

Many of its members go on to become active in the hardcore Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the ABVP, the Indian Universities Council.

ABVP members have been involved in campus disturbances against Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains.

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