“Daylight lingers into dusk — A while.
Memory is all that’s left — Her smile.”
From Everyday Thoughts of Bachchoo

Gentle reader, if you can’t or won’t bear with crudeness, turn away now. There is a point to the story I am about to tell which seems to me worth making in the context of a very nasty legal allegation against 11 men in the Liverpool Crown Court. Their case continues and we must presume their innocence till they are found guilty. But first the report of a conversation with a good Indian friend.

We are dining with our respective partners and other ladies, but that, after a few whiskies, doesn’t inhibit him.
“Yaar, sach bata, what’s your score?”
“I don’t play cricket,” I reply.
“Nahin, yaar, you know what I mean, living abroad all these years…”
I think everyone knows what he means and, despite my embarrassed pretence of innocence and my attempts at telepathic dissuasion, he comes out with it.
“Girls… women, ...!” he trails off. “Indians... different... uptight yaar.” Is there pain or just envy in this observation?
“Gentlemen stick to their partners or don’t live to tell the tale,” I say. “This Sula Sauvignon is very palatable.”
No deviation. He broods through his tandoori pomfret. Then:
“Yaar, considering the cultures, one Indian is probably equal to five white women, right?”
He is mentally multiplying his “Indian score” by five. Then, by universal consent and nasty looks from the women, the topic is banished.
Was I astounded at his “scoring” enquiry? Any male who has kept the kind and class of company I have kept, of Indians and others, knows that in certain male circles numbers and notches-on-the-gun are a subject of earnest exchange. You may think that this is true of younger males of the species, but I assure you there are those of the older category who retain adolescent streaks and strains.
What assumption, what generalisation emerges from this sordid tale? That there persists in the subcontinent the idea that the “white” woman is free and in most cases “easy”, that her culture and liberated state inclines her to have a liberal attitude to sex. She is, in contrast to our sisters, biddable and beddable.
So to the case: Eleven men from Rochdale and Oldham, two towns in Greater Manchester, are accused in the Liverpool court of several counts of rape and of trafficking underage girls for sex.
The allegations, made public through the prosecution day after day at the trial, are horrific. The men, aged between 22 and 59, it is alleged, “acted together to sexually exploit several girls”.
They befriended early teenage girls from vulnerable family backgrounds, some of them from broken homes who were in the care of social services. They encountered and propositioned them, some as young as 13, in fast food and takeaway shops, offering to take them out, plying them with drink and drugs and luring them to houses where they were sexually assaulted by groups of waiting men.
Over a period of two years, the compass of the allegations, the girls, now witnesses, were given food, alcohol, drugs and money in exchange for sex with groups of the accused.
The girls knew the men by nicknames such as “Tiger” and “Master”. Their real names, all except that of the oldest of them, have been published in the papers and on the Internet. I have no reason to reproduce them here but it is material to the argument that they are all Asian men of Pakistani origin because the case has led to anti-Asian and anti-Pakistani demonstrations in Greater Manchester.
There is no target for a demonstration and no political point to be made. The demonstrations, instigated and organised by Right-wing grouplets with racial agendas, have been scrupulously contained by the police as they could threaten to break into a phenomenon that is thankfully unknown in Britain — inter-racial Asian-white riots.
Yes, there have been riots in which whites, blacks and browns looted shops. There have been demonstrations against some perceived injustice by the police or the state which have turned into riots. There have, in Northern Ireland been riots on a large scale between Catholic and Protestants groups and mobs, but since 1958 in Notting Hill, London there haven’t been riots between the racial groups of the UK.
The commentators, even in the tabloid press, while pointing out that the accused are all mature (sic) Mirpuris and the victims all underage white British girls, are wary or just circumspect about making it a racial case. When the case is done and the jury brings in its verdicts, the comment could very well take a nasty turn.
The ugly story could be that of Asian, Pakistani men, shut out in their virtually isolated ghetto existence from any access to consenting Brit females, preying on the weakest and the most helpless in society. Pimps, rapists and sexually predatory men come in all colours, classes, races and national origins. There are probably hundreds of Asian prostitutes in the sex trade of Britain and they may indeed be pimped by Asian men. I haven’t encountered any of them so cannot with confidence assert that they go about their business through the pressure of their lives, but instinctively feel that the crimes of which the Liverpool 11 are accused have their origins in a deep and dirty clash of intercultural assumptions. It’s not business or the pressure of life.
Would the 11, presuming that they did what they are accused of, have done it to Pakistani girls? Or would they have looked upon them as plausible sisters or daughters? So why are the young white girls fair game for this degradation and evil?
In the race-relations industry of Britain there is a flourishing trade in the vilification of the white “stereotypes” of Asians. Could this narrative of the Liverpool 11, if guilty, be seen as the most evil case of a not universal, but prevalent Asian perception of white women? The first really criminal stereotype?