Abhijit Pandya
Abhijit Pandya is a British solicitor who has stood as a UK Independence Party candidate at the 2010 general election for Harrow East, and in a Leicester South byelection in 2011. He was briefly UKIP's head of research and is listed as one of the UK Daily Mail's 'Rightmind Bloggers'.
Pandya has been named by anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller as 'one of our British solicitors' who assisted legal actions against British home secretary Theresa May who banned Geller and colleague Robert Spencer from entering the UK in June 2013.
Contents
Background
According to his Daily Mail biography, Pandya is a [[former lecturer in the Law Department of Durham University and a teaching fellow at the London School of Economics]]. He is currently the Executive Director of the Centre for Democratic Studies.
Views
Pandya sparked outrage over a blog he wrote just a week before the 2011 by-election, in which he quoted and backed controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has described Islam as 'a retarded ideology'.[1]
A Leicester Mercury editorial condemned Pandya’s blog as
- a wildly inflammatory rant which boiled down to a crass and nasty characterisation of Muslims as lazy, intolerant spongers who are a threat to the British way of life. It was not part of a reasoned debate about multiculturalism, but a series of sweeping, unsubstantiated generalisations which demonise the Muslim community.[1]
Affiliations
- Birkenhead Society (now Discourse UK, a libertarian 'freedom of speech' debating society which successfully 'overturned the Labour Home Secretary Jacqui’ Smith’s Ban on the Dutch MP Geert Wilders speaking in Parliament on the subject of multiculturalism and Islam'. [2]
- Lord Justice Sedley, has worked for him as an associate
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Bob Pitt, UKIP by-election candidate backs Geert Wilders, says Islam is ‘morally flawed and degenerate’, Islamophobia Watch, 27 April 2011
- ↑ Abhijit Pandya, Political correctness continues to stifle debate on multiculturalism, 4 October 2011, accessed 10 February 2015
