The recent resignation of the prime minister of Portugal, António Costa, occasioned a number of chagrined headlines in India along the lines of ‘Goan-origin prime minister quits’. Costa’s origins are in our coastal state of Goa, a former Portuguese colony; he is the recipient of a Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest Indian honour for foreign citizens of Indian descent, for being the first Indian head of a European government. Now he was gone.
This sad news was followed by the shock resignation of 45-year-old Leo Varadkar, the son of an Indian immigrant, as prime minister of Ireland, “for personal and political reasons”. When Varadkar, then just 38 years old, became prime minister of Ireland in 2017, it was hailed in India as if it represented some sort of national triumph. “See—one of our boys has become their leader,” a Mumbaikar friend told me with great pride. I was impolite enough to remind him that he had opposed the election of Sonia Gandhi as prime minister of India on the very same grounds that he was hailing Varadkar’s anointment. “That’s different,” he replied lamely, before changing the subject with a crestfallen look on his face.
Most recently, the rise of Rishi Sunak as the prime minister of the United Kingdom has been widely celebrated in India, even by those who do not share his conservative brand of politics. But there, too, an election in the second half of this year is widely expected, and at least judging by the polls, to be likely to end his stint at 10 Downing Street.
A year that began with three prominent prime ministers of Indian descent in Europe is likely to end with none.
Most Indians will experience a sense of regret. Varadkar overcame what would once have been impossible odds to rise to the top. A generation ago, he would have been seen as too young, too “different” (he is gay), and too brown to aspire to head a Western democracy. His name marked him out, too, as foreign. And yet his victory showed how much the world had moved on from those sorts of prejudices, even while other tendencies suggested that xenophobia was on the rise.
And yet, was this such a new development in the world, after all? The founding premier of the Irish Republic was a man of Portuguese descent, Éamonn Da Valera. And he was hardly a rarity in Europe, where France has had a president named MacMahon in the 19th century, and another named Sarkozy, son of a Hungarian count, more recently. Indeed, national identity in Europe has long been rather fluid—the current dynasty of English monarchs hailed from Germany and the Swedish ones from France. The French and the Germans have fought innumerable wars with each other for centuries, but just over a decade ago the French had a finance minister with the German name Strauss-Kahn, while his German counterpart bore the French name Lafontaine.
The election of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008—the son of a Kenyan immigrant with what he cheerfully admitted was a “funny name”, as well as a Muslim middle name—showed American broadmindedness at its best. After all, it was impossible to imagine a non-Japanese prime minister in Tokyo, or a non-Chinese in Beijing. And yet America was hardly a global pioneer; Argentina had elected the son of a Syrian immigrant, Carlos Saul Menem, as president, and Peru had done the same with Alberto Fujimori, whose parents were Japanese, though both are overwhelmingly white-majority nations. In Jamaica, Edward Seaga, the son of a Lebanese immigrant, was elected prime minister in a country 97 percent black, while Janet Jagan, a white Jewish American woman, became president of Guyana, whose population consists entirely of either blacks or Indians.
So why, indeed, shouldn’t political talent be hired across national borders? Multinational corporations do it all the time and everyone applauds. Indians rejoice that seven major MNCs are headed by Indians who left our country to make good abroad.
Mediaeval kings hired their warriors where they could—Indian armies, well before the colonial era, had Turkish artillery gunners, Uzbek horsemen and French generals, and no one found it odd. It’s only more recently that we have expected our leaders to conform to a national identity stereotype.
But that could be breaking. In 2015, the outgoing president of Georgia (2004-2013), Mikheil Saakashvili, denied a third term by his country’s Constitution, decided he could not merely languish in retirement when he was not yet 50. So he switched countries, adopting Ukrainian citizenship and taking on the governorship of the Oblast (province) of Odessa. After a successful first year, he ran into trouble in his second and resigned. But he’s only 54 now, and someone might want to suggest he try, for example, Bihar next.
When Libya’s late dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi, promoted a union with Egypt (under the name of the United Arab Republic, or UAR) in the 1970s, he indiscreetly said that his idea came from the fact that Egypt had people but no real leader, whereas Libya had a leader but no real people. The Egyptian authorities naturally balked at a merger on such assumptions, and the UAR died stillborn.
But the precedent Saakashvili has set could well apply to more consensually successful figures like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who never got to apply his vision and self-discipline to a bigger country than his tiny city-state. The number of admirers of Singapore on Indian WhatsApp groups suggests that he would have been welcome to many here.
The logic would work even better today. Imagine if, say, Barack Obama, unemployed since turning 53, were to be recruited to run Britain after the shambolic shenanigans around its bizarre Brexit? Or if those of China’s fearsome technocrats, who (unlike their supreme leader, Xi Jinping), are obliged to retire from office by their party’s rigid 10-year rule, were invited perhaps to sort out Pakistan? The possibilities boggle the mind.
(Views are personal)
(office@tharoor.in)
Shashi Tharoor | Third-term Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram and Sahitya Akademi winning author of 24 books, most recently Ambedkar: A Life