LAST Sunday the BBC reported the increasingly violent sectarian clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, sparked by the result of a cricket match some weeks ago on another continent. With exquisite timing, a Sunday Times article by Sarfraz Manzoor told us that ‘Now is the time to acknowledge our empire’s sins’. He was prompted to write it after seeing the play Silence on the day our Queen died. It’s about the bloodletting which resulted ‘from the tragedy of [Indian] partition – a mayhem made in Britain’. But this carnage was by no means caused by ‘our empire’.
