The UK’s new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has, by now, become a household talking point in India because of his subcontinental origin. Every Indian on social media knows of his Punjabi grandparental background, that his family was routed through Kenya and Tanzania, that he is British-born, that he is the son-in-law of the legendary Indian IT tycoon N R Narayana Murthy. Not every Indian knows—or is concerned with knowing—about Sunak’s economic convictions, or about his unapologetic Brexiteerism, or about the trade relations with India that he might pursue.
The point of this column is not so much Sunak but about how Indians of a certain religiopolitical persuasion have lost it, cheering the elevation of a foreign citizen to head-of-government of a foreign nation despite the utter immateriality of his genealogical track.
In the fulsomeness with which his making the cut for 10 Downing Street is being cheered lies an uncomfortable fact about modern-day Indianness: it is appallingly selective about whom it cheers, whom it marks—and markets—as being, to use a phrase out of anthropology, ‘out of India’.
The previous person—a half-PIO (person of Indian origin)—to have been thus celebrated with outré animation was the US vice-president Kamala Harris. It could be argued, somewhat snarkily, that it has been too long since she took the VP’s seat in January 2021, and that Sunak’s elevation saved Indians from a psychogenic slump. In the event, after a brief dalliance with politesse towards exultant Indians, Harris has gone on to ignore India.
More to the point is the question about how genealogy-fixated Indians have historically viewed—and continue to perceive—Indian-origin leaders of countries other than in the Global North. Do they claim them for and as their own, or do they conspicuously look away? Do Indian-origin leaders of developing nations, some of whom have contributed significantly to their countries of domicile, even find mention in the Indian media? Or is our vision immovably fixed, as a country and a people, on the so-called Western nations?
There are, now, seven Indian-origin leaders in countries of the Global South, including five heads-of-state: President Halimah Yacob of Singapore, President Prithvirajsing Roopun aka Pradeep Singh Roopun of Mauritius, President Chandrikapersad ‘Chan’ Santokhi aka Sheriff of Suriname, President Mohamed Irfaan Ali of Guyana, and President Wavel Ramkalawan of the Seychelles (elected in the first peaceful transition in the Seychelles since its independence from Britain in 1976). The other two are heads-of-government: Prime Minister António Luís Santos da Costa of Portugal (who is infrequently mentioned in passing in the Goan media), and Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth of Mauritius.
In the past 40 years, there have been 32 Indian-origin leaders of foreign nations (including Rishi Sunak). Some of them found fleeting mention in India’s usually ebullient chronicles of foreign affairs, but none was raucously celebrated. In fact, few of these names make the cut of fame in India: Mauritian prime ministers Seewoosagar ‘Chacha’ Ramgoolam and Navinchandra Ramgoolam, and presidents Anerood Jugnauth, Veerasamy Ringadoo, Cassam Uteem, Rajkeswur ‘Kailash’ Purryag, and Dr Bibi Ameenah Firdaus Gurib-Fakim; Portuguese Prime Minister Alfredo Jorge Nobre da Costa; Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad (who gained some notoriety in India for his initial pro-Malay identarian bumiputra policymaking before he gave it up for a more-inclusive Bangsa Malaysia national identity, which crossover, not surprisingly, found little commendation in the Indian media);
Singaporean presidents Chengara Veetil Devan Nair and Sellapan Ramanathan (the island-nation’s longest-serving head of state); Surinamese prime ministers Liakat Ali Errol Alibux and Pretaapnarian Shawh Radhecheran Radhakishun, and presidents Lachmipersad Frederik ‘Fred’ Ramdat Misier and Ramsewak Shankar; Trinidadian and Tobagonian prime ministers Basdeo Panday (uncelebrated despite having been the first person of Indian origin and the first Hindu to be a prime minister of the state) and Kamla Persad-Bissessar (also uncelebrated despite being the first Indian-origin woman to be the prime minister of a foreign sovereign nation), and President Noor Mohamed Hassanali (his being the first Muslim head-of-state in the Americas is equally unsung—although one shouldn’t expect Indians to eulogise a Muslim Indian-origin head-of-state); Guyanese Prime Minister Moses Veerasammy Nagamootoo (also the author of the well-received 2001 novel Hendree’s Cure on the lives of “Madrasi fishermen, market-traders, rice farmers, Kali worshippers, cricketers, turfites and see-far practitioners who inhabited the Corentyne village of Whim in the 1950s and 60s”), and presidents Cheddi Berret Jagan (considered Guyana’s Pater Patriae, and the first Hindu Indian-origin head of government outside of South Asia), Bharrat Jagdeo, and Donald Rabindranauth Ramotar (recipient of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman in 2015, to nearly no particular lauding); and Fijian Prime Minister Mahendra Pal Chaudhry (also awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman in 2004).
The other Indian-origin leader aside from Rishi Sunak to fall within the Global North is the former prime minister of Ireland, Leo Eric Varadkar. But he, too, has been largely underrecognised in India.
An echo of this homeland exaltation of unprodigal progeny finds a bygone echo in the Irish origins of 23 US presidents (including the incumbent Joe Biden). But the celebration of their Irishness was limited to John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton (almost all of it aimed at garnering Irish Catholic votes). This presidential extractive outreach—which never reached the extremes of stemma-saluting—has faded. While the US arbitrated a peace agreement between Northern Ireland separatists and London, successive US administrations have also cracked down hard on Irish American funding of the conflict in Ireland, almost ending it.
No one today celebrates Biden’s Irish bloodline—neither in the US nor in Ireland. I can’t help but think that therein lies a moral for India in this.
KAJAL BASU
Veteran journalist
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)