Row Erupts Over Downing Street Meeting By Tory Sikh MP Uppal

Tory Sikh MP Paul Uppal resisted allowingother parties to attend meetingwith cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood.

LONDON – Sir JeremyHeywood, the cabinet secretary,became embroiled in aparty political row after Labourand Liberal Democrat MPswere initially excluded from ameeting to discuss MargaretThatcher’s 1984 decision tosend an SAS officer to India toadvise on the expulsion of militantsfrom the Golden Templein Amritsar.Paul Uppal, ConservativeMP for WolverhamptonSouth West, was due to meetHeywood on Monday nightto discuss an investigation orderedby David Cameron afterthe publication of governmentpapers from 1984. The documentsshowed that the Thatchergovernment respondedfavourably to a request fromDelhi for help in drawing upplans to launch a military operationto remove militants fromthe holiest site in the Sikh faith.Uppal, Britain’s only SikhMP, who accompanied Cameronon his visit to Amritsar lastyear, initially resisted calls to allowMPs from other parties toattend the meeting. But Labourand Lib Dem MPs were admittedafter representations toHeywood, who was praised byLabour for acting in a fair andbalanced manner.The row broke out whenUppal announced on the SikhTelevision Channel in a roundtablediscussion with LabourMPs Pat McFadden and TomWatson over the weekend thathe was due to meet the cabinetsecretary.It is understood that theprime minister’s political staffin Downing Street arranged themeeting between Heywood andUppal. Cameron, who is said tobe deeply concerned about theimpact of the revelations from1984 among Sikh voters, recordeda message for the SikhChannel in which he spoke ofthe “dreadful incident” at theGolden Temple which “remainsa source of deep pain toSikhs everywhere”.Uppal said: “On Mondaynight I am actually going to goand see Sir Jeremy Heywoodwith some other Sikhs, just toimpress on him the level ofsentiment and how sensitivethis is. It is important we takethe politics out of this … butI have wanted to go and seethe people right at the centreof this to impress upon themhow important it is that wemove urgently and we get tothe truth.”Watson, the Labour MPfor West Bromwich East, challengedUppal to explain whyno other MP had been invitedto meet Heywood.Thisprompted DrGurnan Singh,the channel’spresenter, to say to Uppal:“Why don’t you have an allpartyapproach on this?”Uppal said: “I am also goingto ask leaders within theSikh community to go and seeSir Jeremy Heywood as wellbecause primarily I am comingat this not from a politicalpoint – I am a Sikh.” Asked byWatson whether he would allowhim to attend the meetingas a fellow elected MP, Uppalsaid: “I requested this somedays ago. OK? … I want totake the politics out of this. Iwant to go and see Sir JeremyHeywood. He is going to havesome other representatives ofthe Sikh community there. Ifhe wants to have a meetingwith Tom Watson I am sure hewill be happy to do that.”Uppal, who eventually metthe cabinet secretary with theformer Labour business ministerPat McFadden, said: “Asthe only Sikh MP it was onlyreasonable and sensible that Ishould go and see the cabinetsecretary,” he told the Guardian.“I got an invite. I had beenpushing for it. I made it clear Iwanted to see the cabinet secretary.”McFadden said: “No oneshould underestimate the degreeof pain which still existsin the Sikh community aboutthese events [in 1984] partlybecause of the belief that thefull truth has never been told.I stressed to the cabinet secretarythe importance of tellingthe full truth about any UKinvolvement and that anythingless would simply feed a senseof suspicion and mistrust. Wehave to see what is published.”