Flag waving

John Biggs-Davison, Conservative MP for Chigwell, tells me he will be briefly airing his knowledge of Urdu when he speaks at tomorrow's Trafalgar Square rally organized by the Pakistan Solidarity Front in support of a united Pakistan. Before entering British politics he served in both wings of Pakistan and passed "first-class" in Urdu, which he admits is not quite as good as Enoch Powells “interpretership”.

At the time of independence he was deputy commissioner and political agent at Dera Ghazi Khan and also commandant of the border military police. He had to have the first Pakistani flag made by the local dirzi (tailor) He later presented that flag and the last British flag to fly there to the Pakistan Society in London, which he founded with Nasim Ahmed, London correspondent of Dawn.

Refugees banned

My paragraph yesterday about Krishna Menon's intention to speak at a film show in aid of Bengali refugees al the Commonwealth Institute theatre last night stirred up a nest of particularly angry hornets.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office flew into a state of high excitement on reading the piece; several leading supporters of the United Kingdom (Refugee) Committee for the Prime Minister of India's National Relief Fund, which was organizing the show, threatened to boycott the proceedings if Menon was going to speak; and the director of the Commonwealth Institute, Kenneth Thompson, refused his permission for a short Indian-made documentary called Refugees 1971 to be shown.

Marion Woolfson, spokeswoman for the Relief Fund Committee, denied that it had ever been intended that Menon should address the meeting. Menon, who had already made it clear that he would not be able to stay for the film show, was then discouraged from attending at all.

The Commonwealth Institute, who are responsible to the government of Pakistan among others, had not been forewarned that Menon might attend, nor of the intention to show Refugees 1971 a copy of which had been made available by the Indian High Commission.

After a private viewing, Thompson decided that though 90 per cent of the film was unobjectionable, the remainder was “quite unsuitable” for the Institute’s theatre: “It starts with Hitler’s stormtroopers, and has Nazis' stamping feet as a recurring theme. It shows the Pakistani delegate to the United Nations in 1948 invoking the Declaration of Human Rights, with the clear implication that Pakistan is now in breach of the declaration.”