Security paranoia is absent in HK

Letter from Hong Kong...

Six years after 9/11, it’s hard to think of a world city other than Hong Kong where heightened concern towards security hasn’t really interfered with the gentle equanimity of daily life for most of its residents.

Sure, airport regulations about what you can and cannot carry on board aircraft are just as rigorously enforced as anywhere else; but that apart, the security paranoia that overhangs many cities in India and the West is markedly absent in Hong Kong.

In fact, I rather suspect that health inspectors scanning incoming air passengers for abnormally high temperatures (as a symptom for SARS and avian flu) are kept rather more busy than security officials with an eye out for jihadi hotheads. This is truly a part of the developed world where 9/11 is just another date on the calendar.  

However, 9/11 may have impacted at least one slice of Hong Kong’s population: Muslims, who account for only about 1% of the 7 million people of Hong Kong. Leung Lai-fun, a social sciences scholar at the City University of Hong Kong, concluded on the basis of a research that there was “increased marginalisation” towards Muslims in Hong Kong after September 11, 2001.

In particular, Leung noted, non-Chinese Muslims (typically from the Indian sub-continent or Indonesia or Malaysia) faced greater marginalisation than Chinese Muslims who, being of the same (fair) skin colour as non-Muslim Chinese, were not a “visible minority”.

The apparent discrimination that Muslims face may, in fact, be a case of racism, concludes Leung. Not that that makes it any better, of course… 

Every Saturday at 8 pm, Hong Kong’s only Urdu-language programme goes on air on Commercial Radio AM 864. Hosted by Abid Ali Baig, a banker-poet-writer with a silken-smooth voice and over 30 years’ broadcasting experience in Pakistan, Kenya and Hong Kong, the programme is a lively mix of Urdu literature, music, news, sports, and current affairs.

The show is part of a government initiative to enhance the ethnic minorities’ sense of belonging to Hong Kong while retaining their distinctive cultural identities, and Baig does a great job of keeping the flag of multi-culturalism fluttering in Hong Kong.

I bumped into Baig while waiting to interview singer Shaan, who was in town last week; with charm and gentle persuasion, Baig even got Shaan to sing a few lines of his mega-hit Chand Sifarish for his show.