Can-do Hindu

The tension was high yesterday as the 2pm deadline approached. There were just two people left in the Conservative leadership race. Rishi Sunak already had the support of over 100 MPs; could Penny MordauntA British Conservative politician who ran to be leader twice in 2022. also reach that number, and push the contest to another round? At last the announcement came: Mordaunt had accepted defeat - Sunak would be the new prime minister.

It was a historic moment. Sunak will be the first person of Asian origin to hold Britain's highest political office - and, as a Hindu, the first prime minister to have sworn an oath of allegiance on the Bhagavad GitaOne of the holy scriptures of Hinduism, which contains many of the religion's main doctrines. .

"I am thoroughly British," he has said: "this is my home and my country, but my religious and cultural heritage is Indian, my wife is Indian. I am open about being a Hindu."

Sunak made much of his origins when he ran in the previous leadership election, which he lost to Liz Truss. He told of how both his father's and his mother's parents had left PunjabA state in northern India, bordering Pakistan. and moved first to Africa and then to Britain.

His paternal grandfather Ramdas Sunak worked as a clerkAn office worker who does things like keeping records. in Kenya, while his maternal grandfather Raghubir Sain Berry was a tax official in TanganyikaA state that existed between 1961 and 1964. Today, most of its land is part of Tanzania. . They took their families to England in the 1960s; in his campaign video, Sunak explained how his grandmother Sraksha Berry had spent a year there on her own while she saved enough money for her husband and children to follow her.

Her husband went on to have such a distinguished career in the Inland RevenueUntil 2005, a department of the British government that collected tax. that he became an MBEOne of the UK's state honours. It is awarded to people for outstanding service to their local community..

Their daughter Usha became a pharmacist and married Rishi's father Yashvir, who was a doctor. They raised their three children in Southampton, where Rishi helped out in his mother's shop and also worked as a waiter in a curry restaurant during his school holidays.

Rishi won a place at one of Britain's leading private schools, Winchester College, but his parents had to make considerable sacrifices to pay the fees. He ended up as head boy, because - according to a friend - "he was clever enough, reasonable enough and well behaved enough".

He went on to study PPEPersonal protective equipment or politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, where friends noted that he did not eat beef and did not drink alcohol. He then spent three years working at Goldman SachsAn American investment banking company. , before going to study for an MBAA Master's of Business Administration. at Stanford University in California. There he met his wife Akshata, the daughter of Indian IT billionaire NR Narayana Murthy.

After working for two hedge funds, he became the MP for Richmond in Yorkshire in 2015. In 2020, Boris Johnson appointed him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he was widely praised for masterminding Britain's furloughThis used to be a word for a permitted absence, and refers to the scheme where the government subsidised the wages of those who could not work during the lockdown. The cost of the scheme is estimated at almost 40bn. scheme.  

But his popularity declined when it was revealed that his wife had non-domiciled statusA tax status under British law which means that a person who lives in the UK can state that their permanent home is abroad. They pay tax in the UK on UK income but not on foreign income. , allowing her to avoid around £20m in British taxes. The couple have been named as the 222^nd richest people in the UK, worth £730m.¹

Sunak was a strong supporter of Brexit. He must hope that, with his connections in India and the US, he can make the trade deals with those countries that his predecessors failed to.

Yes: That is why Britain is so keen to strengthen ties with it. It is the world's fastest-growing major economy, well-placed for trade with Europe, Asia and Africa. It is also a nuclear power.

No: More than 20% of India's enormous population live in poverty. There is also a huge divide, made worse by President Modi, between Hindus and Muslims. It cannot become a superpower with those problems.

Or... Some countries' biggest export is their talent. Sunak may never have become so successful if his grandparents had remained in India: it does not offer its own people enough opportunities.