Abhijit Pandya
Abhijit Pandya is a British solicitor who 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 UKIP's head of research in 2011 but resigned from the party in 2012 and has since criticised its leader Nigel Farage, whose 'methods I deplore'. [1]
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.
He is listed as one of the UK Daily Mail's 'Rightmind Bloggers', though does not appear to have written for them since 2012. He also runs his own blog, in which he sets out his modus operandi as a 'campaigner for free-speech, moral decency, a sense of national duty and love of Britain, for free-markets both domestically and globally, low-taxes, and the destruction of the idea of a federal EU'. [2]
Background
According to his Daily Mail blogger biography, Pandya is a former lecturer in the Law Department of Durham University and a teaching fellow at the London School of Economics. In 2012 he was 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'.[3]
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.[3]
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'. [4]
- Lord Justice Sedley, Pandya has worked for him as an associate
Articles
- Abhijit Pandya, Why no decent Tory should vote Ukip, Telegraph, 12 Apr 2012
Social media and blog
- Abhijit P.G. Pandya,
- Facebook: Abhijit Pg Pandya
Notes
- ↑ Abhijit Pandya, Why no decent Tory should vote Ukip, Telegraph, 12 Apr 2012, accessed 10 February 2015
- ↑ Abhijit P.G. Pandya, Personal blog, accessed 10 February 2015
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 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
