India's Deadliest Enemy in the UK Are the Mirpuris

How one community wages war against India from the UK, and is now even turning against Britain.

- HINDOL SENGUPTA

The multi-decade grooming gang scandal, one of the biggest assaults on women in British history, has exposed a critical issue that very few people like to talk about—the deadly effect of the community called Mirpuris. A majority of the deadliest assailants who operated as gangs and "chains" abducting and sexually abusing women for years, in many cases, were Pakistani Mirpuris.

So named because they originate from a town called Mirpur in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), in the 1950s such was the volume of migration from Mirpur to the UK that even today the region is known as "Little England", and the pound sterling is the other currency accepted widely here apart from the Pakistani rupee. The Mirpuri forms a significant portion of the British Pakistani population, with estimates suggesting 60-80% of British Pakistanis in England have Mirpuri roots.

The community's mass migration to the UK was catalyzed by the construction of the Mangla Dam in the 1960s, which displaced over 100,000 people from a rural, underdeveloped region. This foundational experience of forced displacement shaped the community's settlement patterns in concentrated enclaves within Britain's industrial towns and the formation of tight-knit social structures, such as the biraderi kinship system.

This context is useful in understanding the community's origins in Britain. They arrived not as educated, urban professionals, but as a displaced rural population with little or no experience of urban living in Pakistan. Their collective identity was forged by the shared trauma of displacement and a sense of abandonment by the Pakistani state, creating a strong, cohesive group whose initial socio-economic conditions would profoundly shape their future in Britain. Additionally, it cannot be denied that especially after the early years, Pakistani intelligence agencies encouraged more and more Mirpuris to settle in the UK to create a pressure group in that country against India.