Indian son rises over the empire

Sunak’s grandparents hailed from the ‘undivided’ Punjab

Sunak is the UK’s first PM of color, but the equality fight not over

London now has a Christian king, Hindu PM, and a Muslim Mayor

London: As Rishi Sunak was chosen leader of the conservative party, social media and TV channels in India were awash with congratulations for the 42-year-old Sunak, who was set to become the first person of color to lead Britain. King Charles III asked Sunak, whose parents moved to Britain from Africa in the 1960s, to form a new government Tuesday, a day after he was chosen leader of the governing Conservative Party.

The former Treasury chief was chosen by a governing Conservative Party desperate for a safe pair of hands to guide the country through economic and political turbulence.

The milestone is doubly significant for many people with Asian roots because it comes during Diwali, the five-day festival of light celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains. For many Indians, it was an instance to say: He is one of our own.

Sunak’s grandparents hailed from Punjab state before the subcontinent was divided into two countries — India and Pakistan — after British rule ended in 1947. They moved to East Africa in the late 1930s before finally settling in the U.K. in the 1960s. Sunak was born in 1980 in Southampton on England’s south coast.

The son of a doctor and a pharmacist, Sunak earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford and a master’s in business administration from Stanford University before going to work for Goldman Sachs and then moving into the hedge fund industry, where he made a fortune in finance. He is married to Akshata Murty, daughter of Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder of the global information technology company Infosys.

But, for many people of color in the U.K., it’s not so simple. Sunak, 42, is the first Hindu and the first person of South Asian descent to lead the country, which has a long history of colonialism and has often struggled to welcome immigrants from its former colonies — and continues to grapple with racism and wealth inequality.

 As recently as 1987, there were no people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the House of Commons. One Asian and three Black members were elected to Parliament that year.

Numbers have increased steadily since, with 65 people from ethnic minority groups, or 10 percent of the House of Commons, elected during the last general election in 2019. That still isn’t fully representative of the U.K. as a whole, where 13 percent of the population identifies as ethnic minorities.

On a broader level, Indians have fared better economically than other minority groups in Britain. Indians earns an average of $16.29 an hour, or 15.5 percent more than white British residents, in 2019, the latest figures available from the Office for National Statistics. By contrast, people from Pakistan and Bangladesh earned about 15 percent less than white people, and Black people earned 6.9 percent less.

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