Because the population of the world has increased so much,
that’s why the government considered
starting to kill people off.
Crime and Covid are on the rise in London’s Little India.
There’s cultural issues, there’s religious issues,
there’s international politics,
and it’s poor.
This west London suburb
is home to one of the largest Punjabi communities outside of India.
There’s a mistrust, perhaps, of authority and the state.
We’re afraid that the police or Immigration will catch us.
Illegal life is very difficult here.
At various points during the pandemic,
Southall had some of the highest Covid rates in the UK,
and government distrust is making it worse.
The rumors are that if you take the vaccine,
what’s going to end up happening is, this is a big government conspiracy
to get rid of all the illegal immigrants.
Someone did it.
They put some black magic power
and also some negative power inside of your body.
I try my best to avoid and become dependent on
any hospital treatment.
As London battles to contain the coronavirus,
authorities are at a loss at how best to protect
this immigrant community
that’s incubating the virus and evading detection.
The condition in Southall is so bad.
[London’s Little India]
So Covid, specifically areas like Southall,
a lot of people are very much on the breadline.
You’ve got multiple families living within very small dwellings
just because that’s all they can afford.
A lot of rental accommodation
that maybe isn’t up to the standard that it should be.
A lot of people that have come here
don’t speak English very well,
so they need to be around the community
that they can communicate with.
Typically, these guys are on zero-hour contracts,
maybe working in construction.
There’s no furlough scheme that applies to them.
So a lot of people are here illegally,
and they’re still humans, and they still need food and shelter.
And because they're not legal residents in this country,
they’re definitely falling within the cracks.
Now, because of coronavirus, there are no jobs available.
I don’t have anything in India, not even a house, do you understand?
My children will starve to death.
If we have faith in our sustainer, then everything will be fine.
You must be content with your fate, and Sikh people always remain so.
So I think there’s a really distinct correlation between
skepticism of any message that the government puts out,
especially the Covid side of things,
and vaccines especially.
There’s definitely skepticism from people
just because they fear what the government’s agenda may be.
Government distrust is deep-rooted here.
Punjabis began arriving to work in Southall’s factories in the 1950s
in response to Britain’s post-war recruitment drive.
In this country, in 15 or 20 years’ time,
the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man.
But as the immigrant population grew,
so did racist attacks and discriminatory policies,
which provoked riots in the streets of Southall in the 70s and 80s.
Southall’s got some of the lowest drug prices in the United Kingdom,
primarily because we’re so close to Heathrow.
Don’t even know what cell it’s in.
In you come.
So police were called to an address last night by a member of the public.
And as a result of that,
officers have found a cannabis growhouse.
And this is the crop from that.
As you can smell, it’s really strong.
Cannabis growhouses continue.
That hasn’t changed as a result of the pandemic.
So when the pandemic first hit,
we were catching more drug dealers with drugs on them,
not necessarily just cannabis, but also Class As.
So they were coming out of the house loaded with more product
to sell more quickly.
Southall, at one point for about a week,
had some of the highest Covid infection rates in the country.
So locally, we had to do something
where we knew this was a massive driver for that.
There is a rough sleeping problem on this estate.
Right, let’s go and have a look.
Hello.
You alright?
Right, just keep your hands away from there.
He’s got a crack pipe down there.
You are going to be searched under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
Do you want to stand up for me?
Brown Rizla and white Rizla. White or brown.
White, crack cocaine, and brown, heroin.
These glass pipes.
Metal foil off the Brillo pad.
Put it in the ends, put your Class A on that, smoke it.
You buy those glass pipes for a pound or 50p
in the industrial estate we’ve just driven through.
That’s somebody who’s using Class A drugs.
So just from an officer safety point of view,
I don’t want to get stabbed with a screw like that
because that’s still going to hurt,
and it’s still going to cause a puncture into you.
Though we asked him if he had any sharps on him.
He said no, but that’s in his bedding.
If that was drawn across your face or shoved into your eye,
that is going to cause a police officer a real serious injury.
So, all the cigarette lighters. I don’t smoke.
I know some people who do.
They only normally carry one lighter.
He’s got lots of lighters because smoking drugs uses a lot of gas,
and they get really hot, and they burn, and they break.
Because of the pandemic, he shouldn’t be here anyway.
But we, the police, have got no powers to pick him up
and put him into accommodation.
That is not our job.
So he hasn’t got Class A drugs on him.
The outcome is he’s going to stay where he is.
He’s not under arrest.
I’ve worked here for ten years, just in Southall.
It’s very deprived.
There’s cultural issues, there’s religious issues,
there's international politics, there's language issues,
and there's a big migrant community.
It’s well documented, unfortunately, with beds in sheds.
So that's immigrants being exploited by, let's call them rogue landlords.
That is a massive problem still in Southall.
Since 2013,
Ealing Council has investigated over 2,000 illegal dwellings,
which they estimate to have at least doubled the area’s population.
We’ve been living here for about a year.
It’s a six-bedroom house,
with two families and three single people living here.
I heard that a boy living in our neighborhood,
and one person among them got infected with Covid,
and the other five or six housemates also got infected.
Maybe they’re afraid that their data may be exposed to Immigration.
Some people have come on a tourist visa,
and so their fingerprints are on record.
They’re also afraid that their address could be exposed.
In this house, only two of us are here illegally.
The rest are here legally.
The landlord has rented this house out to somebody,
and then that person rented it to us.
This man helped us because he knew us,
but when the landlord wants his house back, we’ll have to move out.
Illegal immigrants have overcome harrowing journeys to reach the UK.
But when they arrive, the reality is very different to what they expected.
In about 2010,
I found an agent, and my family and I contacted him.
We were poor and heard that there was work here in England.
He used counterfeit money to apply for my visa.
We were tempted, so we made a deal with him.
He charged me 1.2 million Indian rupees to get through Europe.
There were eight other boys who went through Russia with me.
When I arrived, they took my passport
so that I couldn’t run away.
We faced a hard time during Covid-19.
Finding work is very difficult. There isn’t any at all.
We have rent to pay,
and also have to think about sending money to India.
If you visit a doctor,
they will ask you for an NHS number.
Without it, you cannot get treatment.
We’re also afraid that
the police might take action.
It is very difficult to live illegally now.
The fake doctors here helped us.
In Punjabi, we call them “Chola Chakk” doctors.
They charge a lot of money, but we have to be treated.
I have encountered a lot of vaccine hesitancy in my patients.
And it actually worries me because
the patients who I am most concerned about
that will do badly with Covid
are the same group who just don’t want to engage in
conversations about the vaccine.
You know, hospitals were always full of people dying,
but it wasn't like this before.
It wasn’t young people who are fit and well
who we didn’t have anything to offer.
There’s a mistrust, perhaps, of authority and the state.
There is a feeling that people are trying to get your details,
and they’ll say it’s medical help,
but then suddenly everyone in your family
will receive a knock on the door.
I think there’s a fear that healthcare services
are in cahoots with the immigration services.
It’s a population that’s not got great health literacy
and has missed out on certain public health messages.
There’s a kind of gossipy village sometimes,
like, a casualness about it.
You could call it magic. You can call it faith.
I do see people who just trust in something else
that isn’t this model of healthcare that we’re purveying in a hospital.
When residents of Southall feel distrustful of western medicine,
they turn to community faith healers,
who are only too willing to offer their services.
If there’s anybody coming, police or the council, and they ask you,
you tell them you have a hair appointment.
A hair appointment, yeah.
Hello. Hi.
What do you want, my brother?
I’ve been having a lot of anxiety and things,
and I was thinking could I get a reading or something
to help me with my problems?
Show me your right hand.
Are you doing a reading?
Yeah. I will tell you everything.
Sometimes you get bad...
you’re feeling negative feelings
when you’re sleeping.
You can’t sleep with it happily.
Yeah.
Someone did it.
They put some black magic power
and also some negative power inside of your body.
Oh God, OK.
Someone did negative prayers.
They’re not good people.
What they did, they’re jealous.
They’re your enemy.
We have to remove this, brother.
How do we remove it?
We have to do some bad removal prayers.
Whatever, I’ll need your photo,
and I’ll put it on the fireplace.
I’ll send inside your body some positive energy.
Whatever you feel inside your body that is negative,
I will remove it and bring it outside.
I’ll pray, and you’re going to feel all positive.
If you’re OK, I’ll do it, but there will be a cost to do this.
Well, OK. What’s the cost?
Five hundred pounds.
Oh, so what does the 500 pounds cover?
I will buy the things.
You’re going to buy things. What things are you buying?
I’ll buy 201 lemons.
-OK. -201 lemons.
Flowers.
Flowers, OK, yeah.
Some things. Black magic removal things.
When pressed on Covid and the vaccinations,
they had this to say.
You should take the vaccination if you want to take the vaccination,
but not now.
When I’ve cleared this all, I’ll tell you the time.
The time that is good for you.
OK, you can tell him when to take the vaccine
after you clear everything?
Tell me which month you want to take the vaccine,
and I’ll let you know.
If you do not clear this, I’m telling you, it’s very dangerous.
You think about it outside.
Take five minutes, ten minutes,
and let me know.
OK.
OK, thank you,
Don’t get me wrong, there are some people
within the Hindu religion, some
but there’s more bad than there are good.
And they just want the money,
and they will tell you what you want to hear.
And if I ever saw them, they’d be sorry.
I promise you.
You know, a lot of these, they happen behind closed doors.
There’s a lot of undercover ones that are going on.
My name’s Jaspal Sandhu. Street name, Injection.
I am an ex-criminal, ex-gangster, rehabilitated.
I was involved in every single thing that you could possibly think of.
I’m talking murders, drugs, kidnappings, blackmail, firearms...
money laundering, you name it.
I’ve spent a good 20 years of my life kidnapping people
and hurting people, torturing people, you know what I mean?
You know, like cutting fingers off
and cutting people’s ears off and ****.
And you’ve got to make enemies across the way.
You’re not going to have people that are going to be saying,
“Oh, he’s a really nice guy.
You know, he cut my ear off last time.”
During the pandemic,
Injection has seen crime patterns changing radically
to adapt to a new normal.
A lot of these drug addicts, how they used to make their money
is they used to walk in and out of these shops
that were open on The Broadway.
They’ll steal something,
and then they will sell it literally the next shop down.
And what's happened is everything's closed.
There’s nothing for them to steal,
so now they’ve all started breaking into houses.
So they will sneak into your house while you’re in bed, sleeping.
Seventy, eighty houses that are being broken into
while you’re sleeping.
You’ve woken up in the morning,
and everything’s lying all over the place.
The other thing is catalytic converters.
You could go park your car up.
You can go in the shop.
Before you’ve picked your item up and paid for it and come out,
your catalytic converter’s gone.
Injection knows from firsthand experience
that during desperate times, people will do desperate things.
There’s so many theories out there that one person will send it,
and it will spread like wildfire.
They said, I think it was malaria tablets.
If you took these tablets, your corona is gone.
So every single shop here that was selling malaria tablets was out.
I remember coming to this chemist here,
and I queued up here for about an hour and a half.
I had to force the guy. I had to stick it on him.
I said, “Listen, I want boxes now. I want three boxes.”
He’s like, “Bruv, I ain’t got any.”
I said, “Listen. I’m going to come over that counter.”
I said, “I’m going to beat you. I want three **** boxes.”
I was just worried about my parents.
But this is what I mean.
I didn’t know how much of it was true.
I’m getting messages from family members.
My mum and dad are telling me,
“Get these malaria tablets because it gets rid of coronavirus.”
Members of a Sikh temple
have been working to feed local homeless and unemployed people
in a massive food drive,
which started at the beginning of the pandemic.
So now we have entered the
where you can see it’s very quiet due to lockdown.
These are all the
so the roti parshad that I’ve cooked.
And we pack two in a row, so two per bag.
And this will now go out to the back,
where there’s takeaway,
so the takeaway
Selfless service is food for the soul.
You feed your appetites every day.
So how about feeding your souls by helping others
and caring for others?
I feel I’ve been blessed with this gift
where I am able to connect spiritually to my Guru
and to hear and listen to what Guru tells us.
He says everyone is equal.
Everybody treated the same despite who you are, where you come from.
And this is the beauty of Sikh values, equality.
We are all one.
The pandemic, along with cultural factors and poverty,
has created a mental health crisis in an at-risk population,
causing drug addiction to skyrocket.
I was new here and had no idea about anything.
There was a boy who was a drug addict,
and I started hanging out with him.
I had no idea he was doing drugs. From that moment, I became a mess.
My routine was to earn money and to take drugs.
Because of Covid, the roads and shops were empty.
People didn’t step out of the house.
How can you earn if shops are closed?
How can you do shoplifting?
So they tried to rob from dealers.
They used knives, and people died from that.
They’d also run away with their clothes sometimes.
The condition in Southall is so bad.
I was with that boy for one year,
and now I’ve been taking drugs for seven years.
I had no money.
No clothes, no food.
No shoes.
No sleeping.
Sometimes I wouldn’t sleep for, like, three weeks,
and I’m walking on the road, and I’m sleepwalking,
and then I bumped my head into a pillar and fell over.
Then I woke up after two or three hours with no idea where I was
because I had no home, no house.
I heard that after getting the vaccination,
you will become infected with the coronavirus.
I heard you get coronavirus,
so I will not take it.
Yeah, because the population of the world has increased so much,
that’s why the government considered
starting to kill people off.
That is why.
Do you understand?
It’s from the government, but it should be avoided.
These conflicting viewpoints have created a perfect maelstrom,
leading to a disproportionate amount of deaths in this community.
Despite these challenges,
everyday people remain resilient
and still hold hope for a brighter future.
This pandemic was the first time I saw that the values of Sikhism
give strength to people who had every reason to be really scared.
And that really moved me.
I’ve transformed. I’ve brought in religion.
I've brought in spirituality into the work that I do.
I still do the crazy stuff, but I try and do it in a good way.
I try and help people.
Nobody wants to take drugs.
Every single drug addict is miserable.
I will become 100 percent sober,
so I can try to help other people.
Happiness will return.
Weddings will happen, dhols [drums] will be played again.
Traditional songs will be sung.
People will dance.
Coronavirus will go away.
Don’t worry.
Rejoice and dance.