In 1999, Arundhati Roy published The Greater Common Good, a long essay about India’s dam-building habit and what it does to the people who happen to live in the spot where the reservoir goes. The numbers were staggering: somewhere between 33 and 50 million people had been displaced by big dams since independence, disproportionately India’s poorest inhabitants. In Roy’s words:
A huge percentage of the displaced are tribal people […]. Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. […] The ethnic 'otherness' of their victims takes some of the pressure off the Nation Builders. It's like having an expense account. Someone else pays the bills.
She was writing about the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada. But it may well have been another, older dam — one which is rarely discussed, and which has had downstream consequences much closer to my home country of England.
In the early 1960s Pakistan built the Mangla Dam across the Jhelum River in the Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir. It was designed by Binnie & Partners of London. It was funded by the World Bank, with Britain as one of the international guarantors. The US, UK, Canada, Australia, West Germany and New Zealand between them committed nearly a billion dollars to the wider Indus Basin Project of which Mangla was the centrepiece. Over 280 villages and the towns of Mirpur and Dadyal went under the reservoir, and more than 110,000 people lost everything.
The Pakistani government, having drowned their world with British-designed infrastructure backed by British money, offered the displaced work permits for Britain as compensation: you lose your farm, but you get a bus ticket to Bradford.
So they came to Bradford, Rotherham, Birmingham, Oldham, Luton, Sheffield — the mill towns of the Midlands and North, where textile factories still needed bodies and nobody was asking what happens when you transplant a pre-industrial clan society into (soon to be) post-industrial England. Britain needed workers and Pakistan needed to export a problem. A human spillway was engineered and the greater common good was served.
Roy’s insight was about the visibility of the communities submerged by India’s dams were those who already didn’t count: tribals without land titles, Dalits without political connections, people so remote from power that they just slough off into the sea. The Nation Builders didn’t hate them, they just didn’t care.
The same invisibility operated at both ends of the Mangla pipeline. The displaced Mirpuris were invisible in Pakistan — rural, peripheral, and ultimately less valuable than two cubic miles of fresh water. The white working-class girls of Rotherham were invisible in England — children in care, from broken homes, in towns the metropolitan establishment had written off. Two populations rendered disposable by their respective states, deposited into the same neighborhoods.
Between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham alone. Nationally the figures are harder to pin down, though figures range into the tens- and hundreds-of-thousands. Groomed, raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked between towns, beaten, in some cases doused in petrol. Girls as young as eleven. Similar patterns in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Huddersfield, dozens of other towns. The Jay Report of 2014 found the majority of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage. The Casey Report of 2025 confirmed the same, noting that the word “Pakistani” had been literally Tippexed out of a child’s case file. Operation Stovewood put the figure at roughly 80 per cent.
What remains misunderstood is that the Pakistani heritage in question is in large part Mirpuri. Sixty to seventy per cent of British Pakistanis trace their roots to Mirpur and its surrounding districts; in Bradford it is closer to three quarters. British Pakistanis are not a cross-section of their home country’s 220 million people, rather they are largely the descendants of a specific displaced population, organized around the biraderi — the kinship-clan system of the Jhelum valley, transplanted wholesale into northern England.
The usual assumption about immigrant communities is that the transplanted culture attenuates over generations. It didn’t. The biraderi facilitated chain migration, pooled capital for taxi firms and takeaways, and — crucially — arranged marriages back to the ancestral villages, importing spouses who spoke no English and had no contact with British life. Around 55 per cent of British Pakistanis marry a first cousin. In Bradford, the figure has been reported as high as 75 per cent. Each generation of cousin marriage to a partner from abroad reset the integration clock. Rather than the ties to the homeland weakening as generations pass, they are contractually renewed. Mirpur itself is known as “Little England” — the pound sterling is accepted in its shops and British products are found on the shelves. In March 2025 a group of twenty British MPs signed a joint letter to Pakistan’s Prime Minister urging construction of an international airport in Mirpur, explicitly to make it easier for third- and fourth-generation diaspora to visit what many of them call “the motherland.” The Mangla dam was completed in 1967 but the pipeline is still running.
In its darker operation the biraderi also enforced silence, mutual protection, and a moral framework in which people outside the clan did not merit the same regard as those within it. The hostility and strangeness of England, far from dissolving these structures, hardened them.
The host community was meanwhile moving in the opposite direction. Thatcher's deindustrialisation gutted the economic base of these towns — the mills that had brought the Mirpuris to England closed, and nothing replaced them. At the same time, the liberalisation of divorce law, the collapse of churchgoing, and the general loosening of social bonds that had once held working-class communities together left the white population of these towns increasingly atomised and family structures increasingly fragile. The state stepped in as a substitute for the extended networks that no longer existed, and the children who fell through its cracks were on their own. We all know what came next.
Every inquiry says the same thing. Councillors worried about community cohesion, police dismissed the girls as “prostitutes”, and social workers who raised alarms were told not to mention ethnicity. In at least two cases, fathers who tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from the houses where they were being raped were arrested. Yes, the fathers, not the rapists. The scale of the abuse is so vast it repels the mind. And it’s still happening today.
The blindness was not confined to the north of England. Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale — names which have become metonyms for a specific crime, have not let everywhere else off the hook. Nazir Afzal, the prosecutor who brought the Rochdale cases, pointed out that there had been almost no prosecutions south of Birmingham and asked the obvious question: is that because there’s no problem, or because nobody is turning over the stone? Cornwall — about as far from Bradford as England gets — has had its own convictions.
London answered Afzal’s question definitively. In January 2025, Sadiq Khan — himself the son of Pakistani immigrants — told the London Assembly that there were “no reported cases and also no indication” of grooming gangs in the capital. Eighteen months later, a Metropolitan Police review of its own closed files flagged more than four thousand cases for potential reinvestigation, and London was named one of the first areas for the national inquiry’s local investigations.
In 1948, Nehru told villagers about to be displaced by the Hirakud Dam: “If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country.” In 2017, Naz Shah, Labour MP for Bradford West — a constituency where the Mirpuri-origin population is electorally decisive — retweeted and liked a post from a parody account: “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.” She deleted it and said it was an accident.
At least Nehru had the decency to say it to their faces and mean it. Shah, incidentally, was among the twenty MPs who signed that letter lobbying for the Mirpur airport.
I’m not saying the Mangla dam led directly to the grooming gangs, though it’s certainly part of the causal story. My point is there is a similarity to the sequence of events: dispossession, transplantation, failed integration, and a reluctance to investigate what went wrong. This is precisely the error Roy accuses the Indian state of making. India has never conducted a post-project evaluation of a single one of its 3,600 large dams. Britain has never seriously examined what it meant to import a displaced rural population into its declining industrial towns with no integration policy, no understanding of clan structures, and no plan for when the mills closed.
Both omissions share a root: the faith that development and diversity are inherently benign forces whose costs need not be examined and whose failures will be absorbed by people too marginal to complain. The completeness of the loop is what I find disturbing. Britain designed the Mangla dam, helped fund it, and offered work permits as compensation for the people it displaced. Britain housed them in its poorest towns, but failed to integrate them, failed to understand them, and failed to protect its own children from the consequences. At every stage, someone was serving the greater common good. At every stage, someone else was paying the bill.