In ‘double standards’, none can beat the British

FILE PHOTO: Renu Begum, sister of teenage British girl Shamima Begum, holds a photo of her sister as she makes an appeal for her to return home at Scotland Yard, in London, Britain February 2

Rabindranath Tagore highlighted British (and Western) double standards in his great poem 'Africa' when he brought out the contrast between the serene Church prayers back home and the unspeakable brutalities inflicted on colonised races.

Another classic case of British 'double standards' has recently emerged in the way Bangladesh-origin British national Shamima Begum has been deprived of her British citizenship.

Begum is a East London immigrant schoolgirl who joined the Islamic State group in Syria, has now realised her mistake, and wishes to make amends by returning to British life's security to bring up her child.

However, many in Britain's white society would see her as the archetypal security threat, replete with all it takes to be an Islamist radical, ungrateful for what Britain has given her community.

British columnist Patrick Galey says the Shamima is no longer over what she is but over what she is not — a British citizen.

"But she is also just one of a growing number of Britons to have had their UK nationality revoked over the past few years by an obscure executive power that allows the government to remove citizenship without judicial oversight," says Galey in his recent column that tears into Boris Johnson's government classic British double standards displayed in handling the Shamima case.

Initially, the so-called royal prerogative power now used to deny Shamima her British citizenship was sparingly, rather rarely, used.

A slew of immigration legislations after the 9/11 terror attack and the 7/7 London bombings has empowered ministers to strike down someone's citizenship if deemed "seriously prejudicial to the public good."

Home Secretary Sajid Javid revealed that since 2010, the citizenship of about 150 British had been revoked, according to the column Galey wrote in February 2019.

However, the power could only be used on dual-national Britons and not against someone who could be rendered stateless.

That changed with the 2014 Immigration Act, which created two types of British citizens — those born in the country with undisputed immediate British ancestry and those who came from non-British lineage or were naturalised.

Begum, with her Bangladeshi origin, falls in the latter category and indeed belongs to the group of 150 odd who have lost their UK citizenship since 2010.

As Begum could apply for Bangladeshi citizenship in future, the government of Boris Johnson has claimed that she is technically not stateless.

That is the height of irony.

You revoke someone's citizenship and then expect her country of origin will give her citizenship. The grounds on which Begum has been denied her British citizenship is not supposed to be valid for Bangladesh. As if Begum was the rule in Bangladesh and an exception in Britain.

This despite Bangladesh displaying a far greater commitment to fighting Islamist terrorism than Britain, which has a dubious tradition of sheltering Bangladeshi war criminals, Pakistani terrorists, and radicals from all over the world.

At the time of writing, India and the UK are bitter about the war of words after London refusing to extradite two Sikh Khalistani terrorists with proven charges of assassination attempts on Indian officials and pro-Indian Sikh leaders.

London only goes after such elements if they plan or create mayhem in Britain. Until then, terrorists are freedom fighters and bona fide political refugees like the BNP's Tarique Rahman, who can move around in the UK despite conviction in corruption, murder, complicity in murder and other criminal cases and an open record of backing Islamist radicals to eliminate political rivals.

So if you are capable of securing your stay in the United Kingdom under political asylum, you easily roam around scot-free and ceaselessly conspire to topple a legally established government.

But if you are out of the ordinary, like Begum, even public repentance and admission of guilt for joining ISIS will not help you retain legitimately acquired British citizenship.

Columnist Galey said in his Politico column: "It would be analogous for the government to demolish your house, then deny it had made you homeless because you could theoretically build another."

Galey reminded us that the UK government is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that provides entitlement to all individuals to citizenship and the freedoms and protections.

"Yet the government repeatedly wheels out the falsehood that "citizenship is a privilege, not a right." Citizenship is neither a privilege nor a right; it is rather "a state under which an individual is afforded rights," he wrote.

When British mercenary Peter Bleach was found guilty of airdropping a huge consignment of weapons over Purulia in India's West Bengal state in December 1995, London unleashed high voltage lobbying to secure his release and safe return to the UK.

British diplomats in Delhi and Kolkata hired the best of Indian lawyers, political lobbyists and media persons (some like Deepak Pralhadka playing all three roles) to project Bleach as "someone tricked into the conspiracy".

This when Bleach was found to have travelled to Bulgaria to buy the weapons, to Latvia to hire the Antonov transport aircraft (from which the arms were dropped) and finally securing landing permission in four airports in Iran, Pakistan, India and Thailand.

When the British failed to change the Calcutta High Court's verdict, they lobbied with the federal government and managed to secure a presidential pardon for Bleach.

Imagine if an Indian or a Bangladeshi dropped such a consignment of weapons over Northern Ireland for the IRA and then was caught in the UK. Would he or she be able to get a fair trial, let alone a royal pardon?

Begum and the others who lost their British citizenship have the misfortune of origin that will haunt migrants for all times to come. But Bleach can count, after proven charges of gunrunning and aiding a rebel group trying to bring down a legally elected government, the full support of the British state machinery in his legal battle in South Asia. Much as David Bergman can count on the support of the cream of British media like The Economist when he tries to run down Bangladesh's war crimes trial against those who killed and raped millions without mercy. Or when Tarique Rahman tries to bring down an elected government by smear and innuendo, a government which has presided over Bangladesh's "Golden Decade of Development".