INDIA NEWS
August 1-15, 2022 - Vol 3, Issue 2
EDITORIAL
From the editor's desk Colonialism’s Counterblast: Rishi Droupadi Murmu’s Victory Silences Critics of India’s Democracy and attained graduation in arts from Rama Devi College, based in Bhubaneswar. She also experienced unimaginable personal losses when her husband Shyam Charan Murmu, a banker passed away in 2014 followed by her two sons in 2016. She has a daughter who is a banker and married to rugby player Ganesh Hembram.
Sunak’s rise mirrors New Britain’s growing diversity By Vikas Datta
College, where he was head boy and editor of the school paper; during vacations, he worked at the local curry restaurant. Oxford was the next stop and he graduated in 2001. The same year, he was interviewed along with his parents for the BBC documentary "Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl". He was an analyst at investment bank Goldman Sachs till 2004, and then a hedge fund management firm till 2009, when he left to join former colleagues at a new hedge fund launched in October 2010.
Not many are aware that Droupadi is not her real name. She shared that her Santhali name is ‘Puti’ which got changed to ‘Droupadi’ by a teacher ‘for good’.
Droupadi Murmu
President of India As India celebrates its 75th year of Independence, the country added another proud chapter to its illustrious democratic history on 25th July. A woman from the Santhal tribe broke the glass ceiling to become the 15th President of the Republic of India. First a “Chaiwala” becoming the prime minister in 2014, and now a tribal woman rising to occupy the highest constitutional post in the country, India’s vibrant democracy continues to silence its critics by scaling greater heights and establishing new traditions. Truly upholding the concept of Antyodaya propounded by Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya which means “welfare of the people in the bottom of the pyramid”, or benefitting even those standing at the end of the queue. She had created history in 2015 as well when she became the first tribal woman to become the Governor of a state ( Jharkhand). Droupadi Murmu, a candidate of the ruling National Democratic Alliance, only the second woman to occupy this post after Pratibha Patil secured a majority in 21 out of 28 states and defeated her rival candidate Yashwant Sinha with 676,803 electoral votes. She even secured votes in cross-voting in her favour as scores of MPs and MLAs from the opposition benches voted for her. Such was her appeal and significate of her candidature. She thus becomes the Head of the State, Constitutional Head and Supreme Commander of the Indian Armed Forces and will have a wide range of legislative, executive, judicial, financial, diplomatic and military powers vested in her. She has become a shining symbol of overcoming struggles and extreme adversities that India’s marginalized communities, particularly the tribals have been subjected to for centuries. Born in the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha in 1958 in the Santhal tribal Draupadi Murmu attended schooling at Unit II high school
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“Droupadi was not my original name. It was given by my teacher who hailed from another district, not from my native Mayurbhanj,” she said in an interview. Droupadi Murmu began her professional career as a primary school teacher and later got appointed as the junior assistant in the State Irrigation and Power Department from 1979 to 1983. She was later made professor at the Sri Aurobindo Integral Education Centre at Rairangpur where she stayed untill 1997 , when she won as a BJP councillor in the Rairangpur Notified Area Council, kickstarting her political journey began. She would soon be elected as an MLA from this constituency, before being sworn in as the Governor of Jharkhand from 2015-2021. She has handled several portfolios in the cabinet of the Government of Odisha between 2000 and 2004 during the BJP- Biju Janata Dal coalition government, including Minister of State with Independent Charge for Commerce and Transportation and Minister of Fisheries and Animal Resources Development. In 2007, Nilkanth Award was bestowed upon her recognizing her as the best MLA of the year by the Odisha Legislative Assembly. Just like Narendra Modi’s journey from a chaiwala to the post of prime minister, Droupadi Murmu’s ascendancy to the highest constitutional position in India gives hope to millions who experience severe adversities in their daily existence. During her oath taking ceremony she remarked, “My election is the greatness of India, mother of democracy… [a]watershed moment for India, especially for the poor, marginalized and downtrodden…Reaching the Presidential post is not my personal achievement, it is the achievement of every poor in India. My election is evidence that the poor in India cannot just dream but also fulfil those dreams.” Indeed, India’s democracy has silenced its critics who have been writing its obituary for long.
It could be called democracy's diversity, or even colonialism's counterblast. The race to succeed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson by becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party, which espoused the Empire, imperialism and British national identity, has been swamped with contenders from former colonies in Asia and Africa. And at the end of the preliminary rounds, the son of immigrants from British East Africa was on top.
till there are only two contenders left in the race, at which point the decision will be left to the rank-and-file Conservative Party members across the cities, shires, hills and dales across the British Isles.
Rishi Sunak, UK's former Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Finance Minister, whose sudden resignation set in motion the circumstances that forced an intransigent Johnson to finally bow out, has emerged the main contender at the end of two rounds of voting by the 358 Conservative MPs.
This, though, will not be entirely unusual -- for such staunch British PMs as Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan happened to be half-American (on their mothers' side) and Johnson was born in the US, becoming the first non-UK-born Prime Minister since Andrew Bonar Law nearly a century ago (Bonar Law, however, was born in Canada, which was a part of the Empire.)
Picking up a quarter of the votes in the first round, he became the only one to get over three digits in the second round -- and is followed by three women present and former ministers. The initial race had a ethnically diverse list of candidates -British Pakistani ministers Sajid Javid and Rehman Chishti, Sunak's Iraqi Kurd-born successor Nadhim Zahawi, Attorney General Suella Braverman, whose family's roots are in Goa, and Nigerian-origin former minister Kemi Badenoch. Sunak and Braverman's fellow Indian-origin Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, chose to sit it out. Javid and Chishti failed to get enough traction to even figure in the race, Zahawi bowed out after the first round, and Braverman after the second, leaving Sunak and Badenoch to contend against Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, and Tom Tugendhat, the backbench MP, who happens to be halfFrench. It's early days for Sunak, who has emphasised that the identity of a person born in the UK but with origins elsewhere matters to him. He has to remain in the reckoning
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Suave, efficient, but also controversy-ridden, the former US-based investment banker, hedge fund operator, and threetime MP still has a chance to become the first non-ethnic Briton to become Prime Minister.
Born in Southampton on May 12, 1980, Sunak is the son of (the then British) Kenya-born Yashvir Sunak and his wife, Tanganyikaborn Usha, who grandparents were born in the Punjab Province of British India, and migrated to East Africa, and from there to the UK in the 1960s. "My parents emigrated here, so you've got this generation of people who were born here, their parents were not born here, and they've come to this country to make a life," he said in an interview with the BBC in 2019. "In terms of cultural upbringing, I'd be at the temple at the weekend -- I'm a Hindu -- but I'd also be at (Southampton Football Club) the Saints game as well on a Saturday -- you do everything, you do both," he said, also revealing that he was fortunate not to have endured a lot of racism growing up, save for one incident, when he was with his younger siblings. With his father a general practitioner, and his mother, a pharmacist, he had an easy childhood. He studied at a prep school in Hampshire, and then he was at the prestigious Winchester
In 2009, he married Akshata, daughter of Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy and writer Sudha Murthy, who's also the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation. Sunak and Akshata have two daughters. Engaged with the Conservative Party since his Oxford days, Sunak got into politics full-time in 2014 when was selected for the Richmond seat in north Yorkshire -- one of the safest Conservative seats, which has been held by the party for more than a century -and won it in the 2015 elections by nearly 20,000 votes. He retained it in the 2017, and 2019 elections, with increased majorities. His predecessor as Richmond MP was William Hague, now Baron Hague of Richmond, who held important cabinet position, Including Foreign Secretary, and was Leader of the House of Commons, A staunch proponent of "Leave" in the Brexit referendum of 2016 and subsequent parliamentary votes, Sunak's first government job was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government (2018-19) in the Theresa May government and then as Chief Secretary to the Treasury (201920) in the government of Johnson, whose leadership bid he had supported. He replaced his boss Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020, and while he mostly earned plaudits for steering the government's economic response to the effects of the Covid-19 lockdown, he also became the first Chancellor to be found to have broken the law while in office by breaching lockdown norms. His wife's non-domicile status, which let her save huge amounts of taxes in the country, also became a major controversy for him. It is Sunak's "treachery", which set off the spate of resignations that forced Johnson's resignation, that may just queer his chances to become Prime Minister. (Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
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