Murder in England’s eyes

“Oh wayfarer head South
Where the moustache speaks
Louder than the
mouth”
From Advices of Bachchoo

A man alleged to have murdered Anuj Bidve, the Puneikar from my hometown, told the Manchester court this week that his name was “Psycho” Stapleton. He was asked again and he gave the same answer. I can’t gauge why he gave this answer. His real name is Kieran Stapleton. Cameras are not allowed in British courts so one couldn’t read his body language as he said it. Nevertheless, on the Internet one can see Stapleton’s photograph and there is in his eyes something that speaks of madness.
I hasten to distance myself from claiming any professional expertise in psychiatry but don’t all of us acquire the uncertain skill to detect the glint in the eyeball that breeds the suspicion that things are not quite right and warns us to keep our distance?
Bidve didn’t catch this glint when Stapleton allegedly accosted him on December 26, 2011, on the Salford streets. Bidve, a microelectronics post-graduate student at Lancashire University, was in the company of other Indian students when he was approached by a couple of white men who may or may not have broken loose from a gang of others to confront the Indians. It is reported that they asked Bidve the time and when he looked at his watch to tell them one of the men pulled out a gun and shot him in the head. Bidve died almost
immediately.
Though lawyers and responsible journalists need to be cautious and circumspect about what they say about a case which has not yet come to the courts, I am certain that the murder of Bidve was a racially motivated “hate crime”. This last phrase is enshrined in British law and carries a penalty; though as far as a
convicted random murderer is concerned, the sentence can’t conceivably be heavier if the meaningless act was given the motivation of race hatred.
“Psycho” may have answered in this vein because he and his lawyers intend to pursue a defence of insanity. Is that indeed the name by which Stapleton is known to his friends? Is he proud of it? Insanity would certainly explain why he would go up to a stranger and shoot him.
Would it explain why he was carrying a weapon?
There is, in the possible “racial motivation” a very sinister and one hopes, not widespread Western tendency.
Eighteen years ago a young black man, Stephen Lawrence, an 18-year-old student was standing at a bus stop in South London when he was accosted by a gang of white youths, of a similar age, racially abused and stabbed to death. A police investigation resulted in three men being arrested but the Crown Prosecution Service assessed the police evidence and concluded that there was not enough to convict any of them of murder.
The voices which set themselves up to speak for the black community, though no such coherent formation exists, examined the processes that the police had followed in the investigation and several liberal newspapers accused the police of a lack of enthusiasm in bringing a conviction of murder against white working-class lads suspected of the random stabbing of a black youngster.
The case created political history. The government of the day set up an enquiry into relations between blacks and the police. This McPherson Enquiry concluded, quite remarkably, that the police were “institutionally racist”. Several police commissioners and politicians in charge of the police have since then either
admitted or attempted to deny the charge and some have said they will tackle it and now claim that progress has been made.
Now 18 years later, with a detective nominated by the Metropolitan police to look again into the forensic evidence in the Stephen Lawrence case, two men — Gary Dobson, now 36 years old, and David Norris, 35, have been tried, convicted and sentenced to 15 and 14 years for his murder. The convictions were based on forensic clues — hair and blood of the victim found, all these years later, on the clothing the police had seized and sealed in the days after the crime.
The conclusion of the court was that Dobson and Norris had committed a racially motivated murder. They had killed Lawrence simply because he was black. They are convicted “racists”.
Recently this word has been bandied about in a literary feud between Pankaj Mishra who reviewed a book by the historian Niall Ferguson and compared his stance to that of a self-styled and self-publicising racist. Ferguson has not done Mishra any bodily harm at all but he professes himself annoyed and worse.
Norris and Dobson, I don’t suppose, are perturbed by being called racist. Neither, I suspect will “Psycho” Stapleton be. Theirs is not the safe intellectual racism that can be discerned in a historical slant by a critic. It’s not the racism inherent in a thesis or a phrase or look. It’s the racism of the knife, of the gun, of a completely baseless hatred; of the bus stop and celebratory nocturnal town centre of an English city.
What has generated this breed of murderous hatred? Is it the same as that of the fundo for the “immoral kaafir”?
In 1968 Enoch Powell, a vicious and calculating politician, made a speech in which he said that when he looks into the eyes of Asian immigrants he sees that which will challenge him for the ownership of his country.
In the evidence produced in court in the Lawrence trial Dobson, Norris and friends were seen in a secretly captured video outdoing each other in boasts about how they would love to randomly kill any black person. Did Psycho Stapleton’s friends know he shared this animus and ambition to kill? Did they dare him to do it?
Is this working and lumpen class segment of the British population seeing in Stephen’s and Anuj’s eyes some challenge for the ownership of this country?