Rishi Sunak’s first job will be to steady the ship which has been holed in the bottom, unite his fractious crew and direct the ship to its destination: economic recovery and victory in the next election
BY MEGHNAD DESAI
National pride is a strange phenomenon. Often, in the events most remote from our lives, we react to signals which tell us that ‘one of us’ was involved. Say, when, sadly, someone dies thousands of miles away in a jet crash. We feel sad though we may have never met him. He was Indian. That is all you need to know.
Happier moments are when India wins at cricket or a woman weightlifter of Indian descent wins a gold medal at the Olympic Games. Why is that? What is the psychological basis of this fellow feeling? Is it that the now often quoted expression Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the whole world is my family) is not so much true as its reverse Mama Kutumbakam Eva Vasudha (my family is the world). Apologies for my rusty Sanskrit .
But suppose we ask who was the first person of Indian origin to be head of a Commonwealth nation; the answer would be Cheri Jagan who was President of Guyana (formerly British Guyana) back in the Sixties. (I had the privilege of meeting him 30 years later in the 1990s. He was as ever a radical Socialist distrusted by the Americans.) The second person of Indian origin to be Prime Minister (Taoiseach in his case) was Leo Varadkar, whose father was a Maharashtrian doctor while his mother was Irish. He was Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland.
But let us face it. Indians barely noticed these triumphs. We love the Brits. The political elite who want to establish their left liberal credentials may denounce the East India Company or the terrible loot the Imperialists committed but India only cares about winning in Britain. Hence Rishi Sunak being the first British Indian Prime Minister is extra special. It is the colony striking back and conquering the Imperial seat.
But there ought to be a warning signal posted here. If the British thought he is Indian, his political future would not be bright. The British want a British Prime Minister. He happens to have in his ancestry people of Indian origin. But even they had left India a few decades ago and gone to East Africa. That part of the story is not told. Most Gujaratis in East Africa had followed indentured Indian workers—Bihari, Punjabi—as traders or dukanwalas (dukan being the word for shop) . The indentured workers left their impoverished lives in India, signing an agreement (hence girmitiya) to work in sugarcane fields or building railways for 15 years. After the indenture period, they settled in Africa. (These are the people Mohandas Gandhi fought for in Pretoria.)
The traders prospered and in Uganda and Kenya even as a small part of the population they were the majority contributors to tax revenues. But nationalism is a virtue in yourself, and a disease in others. The East Africans, upon independence, began to ask if these Indians were genuinely African. To be honest, except in South Africa, few Indians elsewhere in Africa were able to overcome the nationalist pride of Africans to satisfy them that the Indians belonged. Just as we think an Indian living in any country is still one of us, the others have the adverse side of the same sentiment—distrust over whether these outsiders who have been here for merely a hundred years really belong. So let us view Sunak with British spectacles as well as Indian ones.
It is a very unusual event in the annals of the United Kingdom as well as India that Rishi Sunak, a young man in his early forties, has become the Prime Minister of the country. I know that a lot of Indians, if not all, think an Indian will rule over the old colonial masters, the British. But the important point is that he is a British citizen, British born of Indian ancestry. He has acceded to the highest pinnacle not through family connections but because of his ability and his determination in fighting for the top job twice in open competition and succeeding.
It is ironical that it is his defeat by Liz Truss in a contest a few weeks ago, facing the ordinary members of the Conservative Party, that eased his way to the top. Truss had made extravagant promises of tax cuts to stimulate economic growth, Sunak had warned then that such tax cuts were unaffordable by the British economy given the state of the public finances. Yet she went ahead soon after she became Prime Minister. The financial markets gave a loud negative reaction. The pound collapsed against foreign currencies and the Bank of England had to intervene to stabilise the market for national debt. The tax cut cost the Bank billions of pounds in supporting government securities and the higher interest rate incurred on government debt as a result of that precipitate action by Truss will hang on as a burden for a while.
You have to give it to the British. They have genuine inner party democracy. Neither the Family nor some such body as the RSS dictates who should be leader of the Parliamentary Party and hence Prime Minister if the party commands a majority in the House of Commons. The Conservative Party has a structure—the so-called 1922 Committee which represents all MPs of the Party, especially the backbenchers. These members have the right to choose their leader by secret ballot. Indeed, whenever 15 percent of the members write to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee that they want a test of confidence in the leader, he has to hold a secret ballot.
Lately, the Conservative Party has been badly divided. The reason has been relations with Europe. Differences within the Cabinet meant that Mrs Thatcher resigned after scoring less than a convincing majority in the first round of leadership elections in 1990. This opened up a division between those who wanted to remain in the European Union (Remainer) and those against (Brexiter). Between 1990 and 2020, the party had eight leaders with Boris Johnson the eighth, who won one of the largest majorities in 2019 on the platform of Get Brexit Done. But then he ran into multiple problems of ethics and discipline and had to resign when most of his Cabinet (starting with Sunak) resigned.
That opened up a contest for leadership among the Tory MPs. Eleven candidates ran, five of them immigrants one way or another. The final two, Truss and Sunak, went on to fight a poll where ordinary members of the party voted. Truss won this fight although in the ballot of MOs, Sunak topped the list. Truss had fun on the platform of tax cuts which would stimulate growth and hence pay for themselves. She, however, launched her tax cutting policy far too early in her regime—after a fortnight. The financial markets saw the likely loss of public revenue and calculated that before growth could pay for the cut, the government would have a bigger deficit for which it would need to get into a bigger debt. So the pound sterling collapsed (as I had publicly forecast) and Sunak’s fiscal caution drew praise. Truss’s position became untenable.
Truss had to resign 44 days after becoming Prime Minister, the shortest tenure in British history. In the ensuing melee, new names cropped up as well as Johnson’s name for a comeback. But this time around, the 1922 Committee upped the bar at securing at least 100 members’ nominations before a candidate could contest. Johnson tried but failed to garner enough backers. Penny Mordaunt, who had contested on the earlier occasion, threatened to run but finally admitted just minutes before the deadline of 2 pm British time on October 24 that she too would drop out. Sunak was able to show the support of 190 members, more than half of the 370 Tory MPs. So, it was a coronation, not an election when, just minutes past 2 pm, Sir Graham Brady, Chairman of the 1922 Committee, announced to a meeting of Tory MPs that Rishi Sunak would be the next Prime Minister of the UK.
His first job will be to steady the ship which has been holed in the bottom. He has to unite his crew and direct the ship to its destination. In other words, he has to not mess up like Truss did, last till 2024 when the elections are due. The Conservative Party is 30 percent plus behind the Labour Party in the voting polls. It is going to be a huge challenge. There were people arguing that Johnson would be a better choice for winning the election. But the MPs are fed up with Boris. They chose Rishi—dishy Rishi, as he was named two years ago by the tabloids.
Winning the next election, keeping a fractious party united will not be easy for him. He displayed exemplary ability when he took over as Chancellor at the start of the pandemic. I watched his first appearance as Chancellor from the Peers gallery in the House of Commons. He was calm and impressive. Being an academic, I am always rating people as if they were students. I knew that he had been to the Stanford Business School which is academically tougher than Harvard or Wharton School. So, he can do the maths. Not many Prime Ministers can.
Sunak fared well as Chancellor and demonstrated that he knows about fiscal responsibility. Yet the test he faces is a much tougher one. Now he has to be a politician, not just a techno whiz kid. Being a British (or indeed any country’s) politician is a much trickier task than people imagine. Sunak will have to develop the political persona he will require to reach the public. Everyone will give him a lot of space since the country is in dire straits.
I do not recall, in the nearly 60 years I have been here, a time when the country has been at a lower ebb in its national confidence and international reputation. So, he will have to demonstrate that he is in charge. Jeremy Hunt, who stepped in as Chancellor for Truss after she sacked her first Chancellor within days, calmed nerves early last week but then the manner of Truss’s last day in the Commons once again sank the ship. Thankfully, she saw (or was shown by Sir Graham Brady) that her time was up. Sunak can leave the finances to Hunt and turn his attention to addressing the people who are bemused and worried as to who, if anyone, is in charge.
Indian commentators are all talking of an Indian running the UK and hoping that the Free Trade Agreement between the UK and India will now be an easy walkover. Steady on, I would advise. The UK needs its new Prime Minister to look after itself. It is a matter of pride that a person with ancestral roots in India is now the Prime Minister of the UK. But he will be no more Indian than Barack Obama was Kenyan.
