The character Raj, one of the most popular in Walliams’s bestselling books, has poor English and sells out-of-date goods. Raj was played by Harish Patel in the BBC One adaptation of Walliams’s The Midnight Gang, which was shown on Boxing Day. The writer also appeared, playing the headmaster. Yesterday, Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation Muslim rights group, said: “It’s a stereotypical character. To target a community and suggest its shopkeepers are involved in selling out-of-date food is deeply unacceptable.
“It’s distasteful. I am uncomfortable with that joke.
“I’d love to have a conversation with David Walliams about it just to understand what his rationale is.”
Gerry Gable, editor of anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, said: “Walliams is planting in kids’ minds that Asian shopkeepers are villains, or not to be trusted.
“The stereotyping is disgraceful. It’s the same kind of stereotyping you would have seen in anti-Semitic literature before the war about Jews cheating in business.
“I find it really alarming.” Walliams has sold millions of books since he embarked on his second career and has become one of Britain’s best-loved children’s authors. The accusation was rejected yesterday. Author and education expert Toby Young said: “There seems to be a whole army of politically correct dogooders on the look out for things to get worked up about. But no Indian shopkeeper will be offended by Raj.
“The people shouting ‘racist’ are nearly always white, privately educated Lefties who have appointed themselves moral guardians.
“Raj ignores sell-by dates and tries to rip off customers but those aren’t things people associate with Indian shopkeepers. Those are just charac-teristics David Walliams has given him for comic purposes.”
In Walliams’s book Bad Dad, the character of Raj says: “I am not a bad man. I just use best-before dates as a very rough guide, rounding them up to the nearest decade!” In Grandpa’s Great Escape, Raj cannot say the main character’s surname of Bunting, pronouncing it “Bumting”.
In TV’s Little Britain, Walliams came under fire for his character having a Thai mail-order bride, Ting Tong. Last year he was accused of “yellow-facing” by dressing as North Korea’s Kim Jong-un for a party.
The Daily Express has approached the author and publishers HarperCollins for comment.
