: Colonialisms Counterblast: Rishi Sunaks rise mirrors New Britains growing diversity (IANS Backgrounder) #IndiaNEWS #International,Diaspora,Politics By Vikas DattaIt could be called democracys diversity,

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Colonialisms Counterblast: Rishi Sunaks rise mirrors New Britains growing diversity (IANS Backgrounder) #IndiaNEWS #International ,Diaspora,Politics
By Vikas DattaIt could be called democracys diversity, or even colonialisms counterblast. The race to succeed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson by becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party, which espoused the Empire, imperialism and British national identity, has been swamped with contenders from former colonies in Asia and Africa. And at the end of the preliminary rounds, the son of immigrants from British East Africa was on top.
Rishi Sunak, UKs former Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Finance Minister, whose sudden resignation set in motion the circumstances that forced an intransigent Johnson to finally bow out, has emerged the main contender at the end of two rounds of voting by the 358 Conservative MPs.
Picking up a quarter of the votes in the first round, he became the only one to get over three digits in the second round and is followed by three women present and former ministers.
The initial race had a ethnically diverse list of candidates British Pakistani ministers Sajid Javid and Rehman Chishti, Sunaks Iraqi Kurd-born successor Nadhim Zahawi, Attorney General Suella Braverman, whose familys roots are in Goa, and Nigerian-origin former minister Kemi Badenoch.
Sunak and Bravermans fellow Indian-origin Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, chose to sit it out.
Javid and Chishti failed to get enough traction to even figure in the race, Zahawi bowed out after the first round, and Braverman after the second, leaving Sunak and Badenoch to contend against Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, and Tom Tugendhat, the backbench MP, who happens to be half-French.
Its early days for Sunak, who has emphasised that identity of a person born in the UK but with origins elsewhere matters to him. He has to remain in the reckoning till there are only two contenders left in the race, at which point the decision will be left to the rank-and-file Conservative Party members across the cities, shires, hills and dales across the British Isles.
Suave, efficient, but also controversy-ridden, the former US-based investment banker, hedge fund operator, and three-time MP still has a chance to become the first non-ethnic Briton to become Prime Minister.
This, though, will not be entirely unusual for such staunch British PMs as Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan happened to be half-American (on their mothers side) and Johnson was born in the US, becoming the first non-UK-born Prime Minister since Andrew Bonar Law nearly a century ago (Bonar Law, however, was born in Canada, which was a part of the Empire. )
Born in Southhampton on May 12, 1980, Sunak is the son of (the then British) Kenya-born Yashvir Sunak and his wife, Tanganyika-born Usha, who grandparents were born in the Punjab Province of British India, and migrated to East Africa, and from there to the UK in the 1960s.

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