At the beginning of this month, Rishi Sunak was living with his wife and two daughters in Downing Street. He was Britain’s first Prime Minister of Indian heritage and was gearing up for a general election which he insisted he would win.
At the same time, Kamala Harris – as Vice-President, just a heartbeat away from that imposing desk in the Oval Office – was padlocked in the junior role on a presidential ticket led by Joe Biden which seemed destined for defeat. She has been a trailblazer. No other woman, and no other person of Indian heritage, has scaled so high up that country’s greasy political pole. But her career prospects didn’t look too great.
Now Kamala Harris – following Biden’s belated withdrawal from the race – is likely to be her party’s candidate in November for the most powerful political job on the planet. She’s in with a good shout of becoming America’s next President.
Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, has suffered an election defeat even more humbling than he may have feared. In political terms, he’s yesterday’s man – evicted from office and from his Downing Street flat, and only staying on as Conservative leader for as long as it takes the party to elect a successor. Politics is a brutally unforgiving business.
But on both sides of the Atlantic, politicians with a connection to India are becoming much more numerous and prominent. One of the most widely circulated images in the wake of Britain’s election on July 4th was a group photo of eleven Sikh MPs, all Labour and most newly elected.
It was a striking demonstration of how much Parliament has changed. ‘Representation really matters’, Sonia Kumar, one of the new MPs, told the BBC. ‘When you look up you want to see people in those positions and feel like you’re able to attain those as well.’
Forty years ago, there were no black or Asian members of the House of Commons – though there had been a handful of Indian MPs in the distant past. Now there are 90 ethnic minority MPs – that’s 14% of the total, and the closest the Commons has ever come to reflecting the diversity of a nation in which 18% of the population regards itself as other than simply ‘white British’.
Twenty-six MPs now have some Indian heritage – among them 18 Labour Parliamentarians and five Conservatives. Fully half of the Indian origin MPs are women. It’s a landmark moment. Britain’s Indian community of approaching two- million people is no longer under-represented in Parliament.
Some may mutter that Hindus don’t have sufficient representation, or that Gujaratis are hard done by, but the long decades when British Indians struggled to make their mark in politics are emphatically over.
Labour’s landslide victory earlier this month has led to more churn in the make-up of MPs than any election for a generation. More than half the members of the House of Commons are newly elected; two-in five MPs are women (among Labour MPs the proportion is higher, though not quite at parity); there’s also a record number of gay, lesbian and bisexual MPs, 66 or one-in-ten.
In the United States too, Indian Americans have become a ‘political powerhouse’, according to a recent article in the New York Times. The community numbers more than four-million. There are five Indian members of the US Congress; forty Indian-Americans sit in US state legislatures; and two Indian Americans, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, competed for the Republican Presidential nomination.
In crude numerical terms, Indian Americans have some way to go to achieve proportionate representation – but a community which for many years seemed reluctant to engage with party politics is making its mark on the electoral landscape.
A lot of attention has been devoted to the background of Usha Vance, the wife of Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate. Her parents are South Indian and Telugu was the language of the Californian household in which she grew up. But the breakthrough of those of Indian heritage in electoral politics augurs a much deeper change in American politics.
The spotlight on prominent Indian Americans on the conservative side of the political divide also emphasises a trend evident on both sides of the Atlantic. Progressive parties were once the natural home of those in the Indian diaspora with political ambitions; now right-of-centre parties are every bit as welcoming.
Indeed, among those regarded as credible candidates to take over from Rishi Sunak as leader of Britain’s Conservatives are no less than three women of Indian heritage: Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Claire Coutinho. That tells its own story.
Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC India correspondent.
London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.
