UK polls: Brexit Party attracts numerous Indian-origin candidates
Britain's Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage as the far-right outfit pitching for a so-called hard exit from the European Union (EU), has managed to attract a large number of Indian-origin candidates to contest the General Election on Thursday.
By : migrator
Update: 2019-12-09 14:36 GMT
London
The key platform of the party, formed in January this year, is for a "clean break" from the 28-member economic bloc to trade on World Trade Organisation (WTO) norms and have been opposed to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's deal as "unacceptable".
This message is being amplified by many of its nearly a dozen Indian-origin candidates, including a UK-born doctor whose family originally hails from India before migrating to Kenya and then the UK.
"The UK has become the Jewel in the Crown of the European Raj," says Dr Kulvinder Singh Manik, who is contesting from Bradford South in northern England – a Labour Party stronghold.
"I want to stand up for my people, to emancipate them from this anti-democracy. We are living in a Marxist-Lenin attempt to overthrow our democracy," says Manik, who works in the state-funded National Health Service (NHS).
The 47-year-old had voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 Referendum but has since changed his mind and says his family is fully behind his anti-Brexit stance.
Punjab-born Surjit Singh Duhre, contesting a similar Labour stronghold of Doncaster Central, claimed receiving death threats on the campaign trail and had to be convinced by party leader Farage not to quit the race.
"I've been told I'm a racist, a traitor and a Judas just because I'm standing for the Brexit Party," says 64-year-old Duhre, a former Labour Party member.
Farage, previously the leader of the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP), set up the Brexit Party earlier this year to field candidates for the European Parliament after the UK missed repeated Brexit deadlines since March last year.
To address fears of splitting the pro-Brexit vote, the party had stayed off fielding candidates in Conservative Party strongholds and went after Opposition Labour and Liberal Democrats instead.
Ironically, despite being perceived as a party which is predominantly anti-immigration, it has managed to attract numerous candidates from Britain's immigrant communities.
Among them is educationist Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, who had also contested the European Parliament elections earlier this year and is now fighting the Labour stronghold of East Ham in East London.
"Wanting to conduct relationships with all countries on an equal footing, without privileging 27 EU member states, is not racist," she notes on the campaign trail.
Among some of the other Indian-origin candidates who have been drawn into the Brexit Party fold around similar arguments include the likes of Sachin Sehgal, Parag Shah, Kailash Trivedi, Munish Sharma, Sudhir Sharma, Raj Singh Chaggar, Viral Parikh and Vishal Dilip Khatri.
They are all contesting Labour strongholds with a slim chance of victory but are fighting to attract the pro-Brexit vote in an election that strongly hinges on Britain's future relationship with the EU.
And as Parag Shah, contesting from the Enfield Southgate constituency in north London, puts it they are all hoping that people would break from their traditional voting habits and vote "against the status quo" offered by the country's main parties.
However, pre-poll estimates show the Brexit Party flatlining and failing to make much of an impact in the so-called Labour heartlands which will also become the focus of Boris Johnson's Tory campaign in the last few days left for the campaign before election day on Thursday.
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