When inclusion is all about exclusion

Mosta mayor Shirley Farrugia is by any measure an asset to local and national politics. Mild-mannered, articulate, and a successful career person in her own right, she represents a type of public face one wishes we had more of. The last thing I want to do is diss her, and I won’t.

Is Farrugia honestly suggesting that political parties should use people’s exotic looks as fodder for a trite and largely vacuous rhetoric of inclusion?

That said, I completely disliked most of what she told Times of Malta the other day. The drift was that the Nationalist Party needs to “open up to migrants” in order to be “viewed as an inclusive party”; being herself of Indian origin, she would make a good reference point.

Sounds fine, except the detail contains one very nasty devil.

Some background is in order here. Farrugia was born into a Hindu Sindhi family; I specify the religion because there are important historical differences between Hindu and Muslim Sindhis.

Hindu Sindhis draw on and are rightly proud of a rich and fascinating legacy of mobile and itinerant trade. They like to joke that when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon he found a Sindhi there selling flags.

More mundanely, there are records of Sindhi men trading in Malta as early as the 1860s. The Sindhis who live here today are the descendants of those pioneers or their employees.

When India was ‘partitioned’ in 1947, the province of Sindh went to Pakistan and a biblical and terrible refugee crisis followed. The Sindhi men who were based in Malta brought their families here to safety.

Tikamdas Jhamatmal Bharwani was Farrugia’s father. I remember him as a hardworking and successful businessman and a fine gentleman.

He was respected by his fellow Maltese-Indians as a gold mine of information about history and religion. More importantly for the purposes of my argument, he had troops of Maltese friends and was something of an institution among Valletta shopkeepers.

The crucial bit is that he was not an exception. L-Indjani, as Sindhis are known in Malta, have always enjoyed a good reputation. To their Maltese friends and employees, their origin is a matter of curiosity and little else.

They are not segregated or marginalised in any way whatsoever. Quite the contrary in fact, Farrugia’s profession, political fortune and surname being a case in point.

I only talk about her background because she chose to go public about it. Good thing she did too, because it happens to be relevant to my argument in at least two ways.

First, it really doesn’t make sense to bunch people together as ‘immigrants’. There is next to no similarity between the experience of Sindhis and that of say, plasterers from Syria or asylum seekers from Africa. To complicate matters, each of these groups is further differentiated within itself – which is partly why people who work with asylum seekers so detest words like ‘suwed’ or ‘klandestini’.

Which means that when Farrugia says she is “the first Mosta female mayor of immigrant parents” (as quoted in Times of Malta), she is being simplistic and sweeping at best.

That may sound like so much academic pedantry, except she’s a politician and her ideas will likely affect society at large. Negatively in this case, because it’s wrong to cram people into ‘communities’ (detestable buzzword that one) and relate to them as some kind of ant colonies.

Besides, I’ve never heard Sindhis in Malta describe themselves as ‘immigrants’. They’re simply l-Indjani or ‘Maltese-Indians’ and that’s that. Exactly why they would want to do so now after 150 years of business, socialisation, and intermarriage, escapes me.

The second problem is thornier. I quote Farrugia: “I am married with two children but my face shows that I am not the typical Nationalist candidate and, unfortunately, it was not utilised to address those communities”.

Let’s leave aside the ill-timed reference to typical Nationalist physiognomy. I gather that Farrugia meant two things. First, that her skin colour and features are the only clues we have as to her origins. Second, that the Nationalist Party should have capitalised on those clues and origins and used them as some kind of evidence for a politics of social inclusion.

The point seems to be that the party should have ‘included’ her by going on about and parading her ‘face’ and origins. I’d say the opposite is true, that in disregarding all of that and presenting Farrugia as Farrugia, the party was being the very paragon of inclusion.

Is Farrugia honestly suggesting that political parties should use people’s exotic looks as fodder for a trite and largely vacuous rhetoric of inclusion? And that they should wheel out immigrant-looking immigrants (that usually means darker skin, though in her case it’s hardly the case) to rope in other immigrant-looking immigrants?

Sadly, I think she is. More sadly, she’s hardly alone. And that’s why I decided to write about it really. I think we may be witnessing the beginnings of a communal politics in which politicians imagine society as a patchwork of communities, each duly stereotyped and carefully labelled, and proceed to cultivate the corresponding vote banks. Very nasty indeed.

‘First Mosta female mayor of immigrants parents’ or ‘competent mayor of Mosta’? I know which one I’d use to describe Farrugia.

mafalzon@hotmail.com