Pratibha Patil has been and gone with London — which the ultra-nationalist British National Party says is no longer a British city — hardly any the wiser. For her part, the president is unlikely to have realized how large some non-resident Indians loom in the stink that threatens to bring down Gordon Brown’s government despite a desperate last-minute clean-up operation.

The scandal has enriched the vocabulary. To lie about where you live is “flipping”. The government is “redacting” by blackening out chunks of documents to protect guilty parliamentarians. At the root of the pretence and prevarication lies the regulation allowing members of both houses of parliament to claim expenses, including the cost of accommodation, “wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred for the performance of a member’s parliamentary duties”. In short, if a member of parliament lives outside London, he must be reimbursed for costs incurred in maintaining a second home in London to attend parliament. Most of those who submit inflated or fictitious claims, including the prime minister, are what the BNP’s Nick Griffin calls “aborigines” being ethnically cleansed. But Keith Vaz, Lord Swraj Paul of Marylebone, and, from across the Padma, Baroness Uddin of Bethnal Green are key figures.

Let me not tar all parliamentarians of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin with the same brush. Virendra Sharma, a former bus conductor who left India when he was 21 and is actively involved in helping children with Down’s Syndrome, refused to make the claim for a second home. He is entitled to do so since his constituency, Ealing, which includes Indian-dominated Southall, is in outer London. Sharma says he has “never been motivated or interested in making money”. Paul, who claimed £110,000 by showing a one-bedroom flat in Oxfordshire where he has never “stayed the night” as his “main” residence (he has lived for 43 years in a central London mansion which reportedly also boasts 25 luxury flats), is candid about what drives him. He is quoted as saying, “I’ve always needed money. All my life I have worked to make money.”

Even acquisitive Indians take care to operate within the law. An unrepentant Paul, worth between £125 million and £1.2 billion and owner of a £6.1 million country house, argues he is “entitled” to the reimbursement. “I don’t make the law,” he says. “I just follow it.” He must be believed when he adds that if the law is changed he will obey whatever new law replaces it. His bid for two leading Indian companies, DCM and Escorts, was made only after the legal definition of an NRI was widened to include foreigners of Indian origin like himself. It must also be noted that he stepped down as deputy speaker of the Lords when the scandal burst and demanded to be investigated himself.

Among other South Asian parliamentarians aboard (or trying to board) the gravy train, Shailesh Vara was caught claiming £1,500 spent before he was elected while Shahid Malik twice tried to pass off Remembrance Sunday wreaths as expenses. Khalid Mahmood went one better, charging £175 per night for the nine nights he spent with his girlfriend in a luxury hotel. The £76 that Parmjit Singh Dhanda, the youngest ever contender for the speaker’s post, wanted for a teapot, sugar bowl and gravy boat seems frivolous in contrast. But Dhanda also “overclaimed” by smuggling capital repayment into his mortgage payments figure.

Vaz, an Aden-born Cambridge-educated solicitor who chairs the House of Commons home affairs committee, doesn’t seem able to decide where he lives. Within the space of 12 months his “main” residence changed from London to Leicester (which he represents in parliament) and back to London again. He is no stranger to controversy. Accused of receiving money from another ethnic Indian lawyer whom he recommended for a peerage and helping one of the Hinduja brothers obtain a British passport, he was obliged to quit as a minister in Tony Blair’s cabinet and was suspended from parliament for a month. He is now charged with claiming £75,000 as expenses for a “second” home even though his main residence is only a 40-minute Underground ride from Westminster.

The plump and bespectacled 49-year-old Baroness (Pola anglicized to Paula) Uddin is the subject of a police inquiry. Born in Rajshahi, she came to Britain as a teenager, became a social worker and local politician until Blair raised her to the peerage. She lives with her husband in a modest three-bedroom flat in East London. Reports of a “marble mansion” flaunting the House of Lords crest in Bangladesh may be exaggerated, but she has never (or hardly ever) visited the small flat in Maidstone in Kent that is her “main” residence and enabled her to receive £83,000 between 2001 and 2005 as overnight allowance for living outside London. Apparently, she claimed the allowance even before buying the flat in September 2005.

The manner in which all this came to light supports my belief that there is no such thing as a journalistic scoop. Every scoop is a leak by some interested party. In this instance, The Daily Telegraph bought the information for £110,000 from an anonymous party represented by an ex-secret service major who had tried to sell it to other newspapers as well. Some other aspects of the controversy deserve mention. First, the now-cornered government persistently tried to conceal the truth and in January 2009 a three-line whip forced Labour MPs to vote for an officially-sponsored motion exempting MPs’ expenses from disclosure under a freedom of information act request. Second, it is doubtful if the audit team Brown belatedly appointed to control the damage has the retrospective authority to order MPs either to repay expenses or provide further details. Third, current moves to increase MPs’ salaries while cutting down on the scope for such abuse (the recommendations will be made public next Wednesday) recall MPs being discreetly advised, when they sought a pay hike in Margaret Thatcher’s time, to make it up in expenses which would not attract the press and public attention that a law raising salaries would.

Another controversy — over non-domicile tax status — seems especially scandalous because of the suspicion that it seeks further to enrich those who, in turn, enrich Brown’s party. Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man who was already a beneficiary of Tony Blair’s good offices and has reportedly donated £1 million to Labour, is non-domiciled, which means exemption from many British taxes. So are Paul and Sir Gulam Noon (called “Curry King” because his fortune comes from packaged food), both of whom give generously to Labour. That might have been less unacceptable if Brown had not decided that the new law passed in July taking away important non-domiciled privileges will not be enforced until after the next general election. Paul, who calls the law “strange”, has warned he “won’t give money” if it is enforced. Otherwise, “I am willing to donate my entire estate to Gordon to fight the next election.” Such magnanimity deserves reward.

An ordinary Englishman once told me that Indians were seen as a modern variant of gypsy pedlars who laid a curse on householders who did not cross their palm with silver, as the saying went. My informant had no idea that Romany lore cherishes words and rituals connecting them with their ancient Indian homeland. But his conviction that gypsies are light-fingered and that police and public have to keep an eye on them feeds the modern reputation of South Asian immigrants for cutting corners and exploiting loopholes. It’s not a well-founded allegation, for surveys show that many poorer migrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh miss out on entitlements by way of welfare services and financial help because of their ignorance. But the adeptness of a few high-profile immigrants plays into the hands of BNP racists and reinforces a stereotype that no one is likely to have brought to the notice of the president as she flitted in and out.