A liberal self-goal on Rishi Sunak: Why India has nothing to prove to Britain on minorities

Minutes after it was announced that Rishi Sunak would become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, leading lights from the Indian liberal stable tweeted praising the UK for allowing a member of the minority community to take the top job, and quickly used it as an opportunity to ponder if India would ever be progressive enough to do the same. As usual, this lot has proven to be too mentally colonised, and too ignorant at several levels, to even hold an opinion that should be taken seriously. However, this is a serious issue concerning history and civilisation, and therefore it is time for some serious analysis to be put forth so that public discourse can look beyond these Nehruvian novices.

To begin with, let us jog our memories just eight-and-a-half years back. India had Manmohan Singh, a celebrated economist who belonged to one of the tiniest minorities in the country, ruling us as the prime minister for his tenth consecutive year. How and why the leading lights of the liberal brigade completely blanked out about him and made their argument as if he did not even exist or never became the Prime Minister of India, is to put it in the mildest of terms, disrespectful. Not just Manmohan Singh, but as has been pointed out, India has had three Muslim presidents. What the leading lights of the liberal brigade mean by minority remains unclear, although if they include communities like the tribals in their definition, India’s sitting President whom they have referred to as a rubber stamp, would also fit the bill.

Another argument made against their line of thought is that India gave its largest minority two entire countries upon Independence, and therefore, India does not really owe anyone an explanation. Furthermore, the only state where the minority community is in a majority has never elected a chief minister from any other community. But these arguments are low-hanging fruits to engage with the liberal brigade in a superficial manner. It is necessary to expose their mentality, hypocrisy, and sense of history, at more fundamental levels.

To begin with, the underlying assumption, while using an event like Sunak’s ascendancy to preach to Indians, is that the British public at large has dumped its racial prejudices in the trash and has risen above these archaic considerations to elect someone who belongs to a minority. Ground realities, in fact, point to the exact opposite. Sunak is unfortunately not the people’s choice; the country’s electoral mandate was never for him. Despite having an admirable administrative track-record, despite having proven credentials with regards to the economy at a time when it is quintessential, Sunak has bagged the top job only as a last-resort option. The country seems to have adopted and exhausted every means possible to keep him out of office, until there was literally nothing left. An utter disaster like Liz Truss was first given a chance until the lettuce beat her, and only after Boris Johnson refused to take the job again and Penny Mordaunt pulled out of the race, that this crown of thorns was placed on the man of Indian origin.

This phenomenon was best demonstrated through a conversation that a British caller had with an LBC host on live television in the UK, which has now gone viral on social media. In it, the caller makes an incoherent case against Sunak for minutes on end, despite being refuted by the host on every step of the way. The caller is at pains to find a single good reason for Sunak not to be the prime minister, or to clearly demonstrate why any of the other options are better than Sunak. And yet he persists, until he is called out for being a racist who will only accept a White person for the top job. The caller finally admits it, telling the host that the country is, after all, eighty-five percent White. “These things matter, I’m sorry you don’t like it,” the caller tells the host in the end. In 2022, the mentality that Indians are the “white man’s burden”, or as Sunak’s long-gone predecessor Winston Churchill described us as “a beastly people with a beastly religion”, continues to persist.

Essentially, Sunak becoming prime minister is not a glowing display of a maturing democracy as the Indian liberal brigade paints it to be, but more of something inadvertently slipping past the goalie, and an extremely vigilant goalie at that. This is not a test that the United Kingdom has passed with flying colours; the test in fact has only begun. How the country will treat its first non-Christian prime minister, not directly elected by the people but a mere product of circumstances, remains to be seen. Will the media target him constantly and for no reason? Will the people throw him out of office the first chance they get? The United Kingdom’s litmus test only begins now. However, for the Indian liberal brigade, they have already passed the test with flying colours. This is typical of them, as they have a long history of giving the United Kingdom a free pass on many issues.

The fundamental reason for the free pass they keep giving the UK, is that they essentially subscribe to the British version of Indian history, especially the part about India’s freedom struggle. This version might have benefited their political masters at some point, but the only beneficiary today is the United Kingdom. Essentially, this version about our freedom struggle, more than giving undue credit to those who had little impact, makes the British look like benign and reasonable colonisers, who responded positively to ideas like ahimsa and satyagraha. This version allows the British to erase their own atrocities, thievery, racism and destruction, as well as the versions about the Indian revolutionaries, Subhas Chandra Bose’s INA, and Indian mutineers literally booting the empire out. After all, they have to keep up with the pretense of being responsible members of the international community. Therefore their public relations machinery has been working overtime for decades now, and the Indian liberal brigade, wittingly or unwittingly, has become a key component of it.

Today, it is claimed that there was no India before the British got here, despite the fact that their company which initially set up base before the monarch took over, was known as the East India Company. It is claimed that the British gave us our railways and that we should be grateful to them, conveniently ignoring the fact that they looted us in broad daylight, driving us from being the richest part of the world to generations of penury. It is another fact that the East India Company has now been bought over by an Indian entrepreneur, and that despite looting riches from the world over, the country has driven itself into such an economic mess that a man of Indian origin has now been appointed to rescue them, but I digress.

Other than thievery and the complete destruction of several indigenous cultures around the world, this empire has committed genocides across continent, engineered famines, indulged in slavery and torture, pushed narcotics into entire kingdoms, and caused conflicts that continue to pester the world today. And yet, when Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or the Taliban are seen as historically unacceptable models in the civilised world, colonial or imperial Britain gets a free pass.

This is the level of distortion and perversity that the Indian liberal brigade has internalised. Despite two centuries of colonialism, they continue to look up to the empire, always ready to preach to their fellow-Indians at the drop of a hat, and that too about how we must be more forward-thinking and follow in the holy footsteps of our former colonists. Clearly, memory has not been their strong suit. But they must be reminded that the liberalism, progressivism, multiculturalism and rules-based order that their favourite empire is a proud proponent of in the international community, are values that are fairly new to it and far from having been imbibed yet.

The onus is on the British alone, and will be for many decades, even centuries to come. A country or civilisation like India has really nothing to prove to anyone, let alone a twenty-first century monarchy with an official state religion.

The writer is an author and political commentator. He has authored the book, ‘Himanta Biswa Sarma: From Boy Wonder to CM’. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.

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