Rishi Sunak and the limits of skin-deep identity

By Uditha Devapriya
“My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.”

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

The appointment of Rishi Sunak as British Prime Minister has sent more than a few ripples around the world. Sunak is the first British Asian to hold the post and the second “minority” Prime Minister since Benjamin Disraeli. He is not the first person of South Asian descent in the Conservative Party: he is the third, after India’s Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownagree and Sri Lanka’s own Nirj Deva (Niranjan Deva Adittya). These are historical precedents in a nation which, more than a century ago, equated Indians with dogs and banned both from its clubs. Insofar as Sunak is brown, South Asian, and desi in looks, then, his appointment is “progressive.”

World leaders have reacted positively to Sunak’s appointment. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe both tweeted that they looked forward to strengthening bilateral relations with the UK. US President Joe Biden mispronounced Sunak’s name (Rashni Sanook) in one of his many gaffes, but called the appointment “groundbreaking.” Justin Trudeau wrote that he looked forward to working with Sunak over several areas, including “the UK’s accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

And it’s not just world leaders. Scholars, including historians and commentators, have joined in, though some of them appear to have reservations. William Dalrymple, for instance, tweeted that whatever way one looked at it, Sunak’s ascent was a progressive development in a country still reeling from an imperial past. Whatever he feels about Sunak’s ethnicity and its implications for a nation where Indians are still discriminated against, however, he is hardly a fan of the Conservative Party, or the recent influx of South Asians to that Party. On several occasions, in fact, he has written against them.

As for Indians – in India, not Britain – Sunak’s ascent has bolstered both Hindu nationalists and critics of Hindu nationalism. Narendra Modi’s electoral base obviously sees Sunak as another example of what Indians, particularly Hindus, can do abroad. On the other hand, Shashi Tharoor observes that the British “have done something very rare in the world – to place a member of a visible minority in the most powerful office in their government.” He adds that despite the racist backlash Sunak inspired, “a majority of Conservative Party MPs did not hesitate to put his competence above his colour.” This, however, is not so much an outburst of pride as it is a rejoinder to the divisive politics of the ruling party in India, the BJP: “Can we imagine the day, in our increasingly majoritarian politics, when someone who is not Hindu, Sikh, Jain, or Buddhist can head our national government?”

Characteristically, Sri Lankans, particularly their politicians, have got it all tangled up in their praise of Sunak. The SLPP’s Sagara Kariyawasam has actually contended that if Sunak could become British Prime Minister, dual citizens should be allowed to enter the Sri Lankan parliament. Sunak, of course, is not a dual citizenship holder, because India does not allow dual citizenship. But Sri Lanka does. The SLPP, going by Kariyawasam’s logic, thus considers Sunak’s ascent as an argument against the 22nd Amendment – on which many SLPP MPs, Kariyawasam included, voted against or abstained from.

The SLPP, however, occupies just one end of the political spectrum in Sri Lanka. Colombo’s liberal intelligentsia occupies another. Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga sees Sunak’s appointment as an opportunity to tweet out her thoughts on British politics: “Amazing that one of us could lead those who ruled us for centuries, only 3/4 of a century after the end of colonial domination! Speaks much for British democracy.” Kumaratunga has since deleted this tweet, because it sparked off a flurry of replies from South Asians that begged to differ over her view of Sunak as “one of us.” One reply, by I assume a Sri Lankan, caught the gist of them all: “You think that the billionaire Sunak represents one of us? Huh.”

These replies suggest that a section of Sri Lanka’s Twitterati, normally a liberal, Colombo-centric crowd, no longer sees one’s ethnicity as a criterion for progressive politics. To quote Kusum Wijetilleke, “Yes, there’s a brown man in the ring… but [he] also just happens to be one of the richest Members of Parliament and has sustained a rather meteoric rise to power. So, different but same same?” This is more than what the liberal intelligentsia will be prepared to admit, of course: within liberal circles, the assumption appears to be that if Sunak could become Prime Minister in the heartland of European imperialism, how come a Tamil or a Muslim hasn’t become President or Prime Minister here yet?

My own opinion is that Sunak’s ascent as Prime Minister shows the potential as well as the limitations of identity politics. I don’t understand the hype over his Indian origins: he wasn’t even born in India, and neither for that matter were his parents and grandparents. Sunak’s party includes a number of South Asians, and two of them are women. Yet both women, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, have taken controversial stances on, among other issues, transgender rights, the British Empire, and immigration – even from India. Braverman was probably not looking in the mirror or considering her origin story when she argued against a trade deal with India by suggesting that it would increase immigration to Britain. Priti Patel’s asylum policies, which would have delighted Enoch Powell, the man who railed against her ancestors coming to England, have been called “unjust, un-British” by The Guardian, which seems to have forgotten Powell’s not so un-British rivers of blood.

Sunak’s “visible minority” credentials – he took his oath of office on the Bhagavat Gita and sported a sacred thread in his first address as Prime Minister – should hence not blind us to his not so visible credentials. The other day I remembered the rather acerbic comment of a Sri Lankan poet, now based in Toronto: “The only minority is the bourgeoisie.” Going by that logic, Sunak is, and was, a member of a “minority.” A hedge fund manager who married into wealth, Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs and became director of an investment firm owned by his father-in-law, who happened to be the founder of India’s second-largest IT company. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he ran into considerable controversy over allegations of his wife’s non-domiciled status and avoidance of taxes on overseas income, though subsequent investigations cleared him of all charges of breaking ministerial rules.

The question here, I suppose, isn’t about Sunak’s ethnic origins. For liberals he will always be South Asian; for hardcore nationalists, Hindus especially, he will always be Indian, even if some have railed against his beef-eating and what they see as his renunciation of his Indian heritage. Rather, it is about what has trumped what: his ethnicity, or his class background. Liberal and left-liberal politics have made a fetish out of skin colour and ethnicity: it glosses over one’s racial identity, presenting it as a criterion for progressive politics. This is the same logic which liberals in the US deploy over Hillary Clinton’s feminist credentials, even though, as Jacobin once put it, Clinton has never been a champion of women’s rights.

That is why no one, apart from Marxist Left commentators, has so far noted or emphasised the paradox between Sunak’s, Patel’s, and Braverman’s ethnic origins and the policies they have proposed or implemented which marginalise minorities. Here it must be pointed out that the likes of Sunak trace their origins, not to India, but to East Africa, to a class of traders and merchants who prospered under European colonialism. Rishi Sunak is Punjabi: like the Gujaratis, Punjabis have been a model minority, assimilating themselves to white cultures because their class preferences share more with White Europeans than they do with other minorities. Anyone who has read Hanif Kureishi, or watched Mississippi Masala, will notice how complex South Asian attitudes to these issues can be.

On the other hand, even though some will see a contradiction between their ethnic origins and their policies, as well as political beliefs, I see no such contradiction. The contradiction exists because we assume what has triumphed in Patel’s or Braverman’s case IS their ethnic origins. Those who think their ascent can, and will, bolster relations with India assume that they view themselves as Indian. But they do not. They see themselves as British, Canadian, and American. South Asians in Western societies have become the model minority, despite being at the receiving end of racial discrimination, because many of them see themselves as members of a class that is ahead of other minorities. This is as true of Sunak’s rise to power as it is of the many protagonists in Hanif Kureishi’s novels who cast themselves off as British first and Indian, Pakistani, or even Sri Lankan, last. “I have an Indian passport,” admitted one “Indian” business magnate, “but I regard myself as a global citizen.”

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com