Have the Tories Had Enough of British-Indian Politicians?

Priti Patel saw her dreams crash as she exited the Tory leadership race with the least number of votes.

The crushing defeat of the Conservative Party in the general elections earlier this year led to the resignation of the UK’s first Indian-origin PM, Rishi Sunak, prompting the ongoing Tory leadership race.

In the first ballot, among six candidates, Indian-origin Dame Priti Patel, former home secretary, saw her dreams crash as she exited the race with the least number of votes. Does this signal the end of the meteoric rise of Indian-origin politicians in the Conservative Party?

It is noteworthy that Indians migrating to the UK since the late 1940s had, for decades, remained a strong Labour vote bank. It was in the late 1980s that the Conservative Party identified the ‘Indian community’, then mostly from East Africa as potential voters.

In 1988, the then UK PM Margaret Thatcher welcomed the new Indian high commissioner to Britain with the following words, “We so much welcome the resourceful Indian community here in Britain. You have brought the virtues of family, of hard work and of resolve to make a better life … you are displaying splendid qualities of enterprise and initiative, which benefit not just you and your families but the Indian community and indeed the nation as a whole.”

The move was slow, but by 2010, the Conservatives captured 30 percent of the British Indian vote, which became the most pro-Conservative ethnic minority after the Jewish community.

This strategy was turbocharged under the leadership of Conservative PM David Cameron. Nine years ago, he said, "In the last Parliament, we increased our number of black and Asian MPs from two to 11. Now that's not enough, but it's good progress. In this election, there is one party fielding more black and ethnic minority candidates than any other and I'm proud to say, that it's us - the Conservatives. And why not? We are the first party to have a female prime minister, we were the party of the first Jewish prime minister and I know one day, we are going to be the party of the first black or Asian prime minister."

It was under Cameron’s leadership that Sajid Javid, the then culture secretary became the first Asian Cabinet minister. Following Brexit, in the 2019 election, the Conservatives who sought voters on racist scaremongering, found increasing support in constituencies with a high Indian population.

Under the then PM Boris Johnson, British Indians made up 15 percent of the Tory cabinet. Dame Priti Patel was the blue-eyed minister and many said she was the ‘Asian Margaret Thatcher’. What followed is history. Rishi Sunak went on from Chancellor to become the first British Indian PM of the UK, though unelected. The likes of Suellla Braverman rose to power, at one point aiming to be the next Conservative leader.

Incidentally, the conspicuous rise of British Indians in the Tory government coincided with the party moving rapidly to the right. It managed to appeal to the more than two-time migrants on a common cause of Islamophobia and anti-immigration.

With the right-wing BJP in power in India, the Conservatives succeeded in exploiting a sharp rise in Hindu nationalism, to the extent that there have been recent speculations about both Patel and Braverman having a future in the extreme right-wing Reform Party, even though its leader Nigel Farage said Sunak “doesn’t understand our history and culture”, in an obvious comment on his background. But Braverman has unabashedly been in favour of the Conservative Party admitting Farage.

Now with the exit of Dame Patel from the leadership race of the Conservatives, will it be, as PM Sir Keir Starmer said, an end to desi ‘tribal politics’ in the party? The Labour cabinet has two ministers with Indian roots, namely Foreign Secretary David Lammy with Guyanese parents and an Indian grandmother from Kolkata, and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy who has an Indian father from Kolkata and a British mother.

Sunak, who is currently the Leader of the Opposition until a new Tory leader is elected, seems to be absconding from most events. According to reports, he will spend just a few hours at the Conservative Party Conference this year - despite still being the leader - and will not deliver a keynote speech at the end, which will see hundreds of die-hard Tories descend on Birmingham for four days. Instead, he will let the remaining four MPs slugging it out to replace him take centre stage.

It may be true that, with rising wealth, ethnic minority voters lean towards the party (Conservative) that they believe will help them retain that wealth along with generational change: the ties that bound first-generation immigrants to Labour are not always transmitted to children. While a plutocrat like Sunak and those like Braverman and Patel rose meteorically, they fell like a house of cards. They got their chance but squandered it away due to their extremely short-sighted ‘tribal’ extreme-right political outlook.

(Nabanita Sircar is a senior journalist based in London. She tweets at @sircarnabanita. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)