Rishi Sunak was not directly elected or elected by Tory members, and no one believes his appointment will usher Britain into a post-apartheid era.
Rishi Sunak's wife Akshata Murthy is the daughter of a billionaire and it is difficult to overestimate the symbolic importance of Rishi Sunak's premiere.
This Diwali was threefold blessed for people of Indian origin around the world: India defeated Pakistan in cricket, and a British Indian became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Rishi Sunak's politics or policies don't matter. The WhatsApp groups that today pass as India's public square are not distorting their views on austerity or Brexit. Not when someone sharing our heritage now leads the country that once colonized us.
It is difficult to overestimate the symbolic importance of Sunak's premiership. He is the first British Prime Minister of colour; The first one who is not openly and proudly Christian; The first child of two immigrants. And he's reached No. 10 Downing Street in less than a century, younger than anyone.
Still, some will try to reduce it. One Labor MP tweeted that it was "not a victory for Asian representation," as Sunak is also absurdly wealthy. It is insulting and blasphemous. Also, a lot of Asians are crazy rich. There was even a movie about it.
Few things fit in less time than Gatekeeper's attempts to define "real Asian". Yes, the fad is rich and connected. He worked at investment banks and hedge funds and, like 16 of Britain's 17 university-educated post-war prime ministers, went to Oxford.
However, Indians remember that no matter how educated you were, which universities you attended, there was a limit to how far you could go under the rule. The royal glass ceiling was as hard as a Kohinoor diamond and Sunak shattered it.
Members of the Indian diaspora also note that Sunak's origin story sounds as questionable as that of many of his people. He is the son of an NHS doctor and pharmacist; His grandmother sold her wedding jewelry to pay for her trip to England in the 1960s. If they went to Winchester and Oxford - surely it is not news that a large proportion of Indians from the middle-class background of their parents expect for their children?
As far as money is concerned - yes, Rishi Sunak's wife Akshata Murthy is the daughter of a billionaire. But Narayana Murthy is also one of the most loved of those Indian WhatsApp groups; He co-founded one of India's most prestigious companies and famously lives in the same Bangalore flat he had before getting rich.
To level the identity of the fad is to deliberately underestimate the richness of the layers of experience, varieties of effort, and background that immigrants bring to any population.
Sunak was not directly elected or elected by Tory members, and no one believes his appointment will usher Britain into a post-apartheid era. And yet the speed of Britain's change is remarkable, especially when diversity has come of late in UK politics. When India was a royal hegemony, two Parsis were elected to the parliament. But it was not until 1987 that another person of color entered the House of Commons.
Indeed, within living memory, a Conservative grandee predicted that Commonwealth immigration would cause "rivers of blood" to flow down English streets. Enoch Powell's party has now chosen the child of one of the people they had warned about, albeit to restrict immigration as much as Powell wanted.
The craze doesn't transcend or defy common clichés about Indian immigrants. He has neither the extraordinary charisma of Barack Obama nor the ideological fervor of Margaret Thatcher. If anything, what attracts his fellow conservatives the most at the moment seems to be his solid, credible ability and air of diligence. Nor did Sunak hide or obscure how much her background meant to her: Two Diwalis ago, she was photographed holding a diya lamp on the stairs in front of No. 11 Downing Street.
Most Indians know that the behavior of our diaspora member in power, is unlikely to be good news for the rest of us. Politicians have long had to worry about allegations of double loyalty. The modern Conservative Party was created by Benjamin Disraeli, a man of Jewish origin. But, as pointed out in a recent biography of David Cesarani, he did not lift a finger for Jewish causes. For his part, Sunak re-appointed Suella Braverman - another British Indian - as home secretary, just weeks after he lashed out at the Indian diaspora for criticism.
Representation is just that: representation. This means that someone of your heritage can hold the highest positions of the state. This does not mean that the person will provide you with special protection.
But representation has value in itself. Disraeli declared the British Empire in India to please Queen Victoria.
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