Rule BritIndia? Not for many years yet

The Victorian Lord Salisbury would have turned in his grave to hear David Cameron’s prediction that Britain’s first ethnic minority Prime Minister would be a Conservative. But Mr Cameron is right to claim his country is “a shining example” of multiple identities. It’s, as he says, a nation where a man can wear a kilt and a turban, where a hijab can be covered in poppies, and a Welsh Hindu Briton is not an oddity. A final instance the Prime Minister chose was of someone who is Northern Irish, Jewish and British. There’s really no end to such combinations and permutations.

But even British plurality cannot afford the burden of operators like Lutfur Rahman, Sylhet-born mayor of Tower Hamlets in East London, who was sacked last week for vote fraud and other corrupt practices and ordered to make an immediate payment of £250,000 towards costs that could run up to £1 million. If the native British do get tired one day of unscrupulous South Asians who move to Britain to line their own pockets, it will be because of the transgressions identified with Mr Rahman, Noakhali-born Baroness Polauddin and others.

However, there is no denying that times have changed since Salisbury created a stir by saying the British people wouldn’t vote for a “black” man. He meant Dadabhoy Naoroji who became the first Indian member of the House of Commons (representing the Liberal Party) after the Bengali barrister, Lal Mohun Ghose, was defeated. A disapproving Queen Victoria is believed to have retorted, “We are not amused!” to Salisbury’s jibe. Her Majesty might have pointed out, as others did, that the Parsee Naoroji was paler than the ruddy Salisbury.

As we know well enough in India, people are often wary of a leader of another race. One wonders to what extent Sonia Gandhi’s “inner voice” was dictated by the anticipation of orthodox resistance to her Italian Catholic lineage. The ethnic Japanese Albert Fujimori was executive President of Peru for a whole decade before they discovered fraud charges and forced him to flee to ancestral Japan.

Chinese-majority Singapore’s late leader Lee Kuan Yew tried to prepare his people for the challenge of multiracialism. Although Singapore’s first chief minister under colonial rule was a Baghdadi Jew, David Marshall, Lee felt Suppiah Dhanabalan couldn’t succeed him because Singaporeans were not yet ready for an Indian Prime Minister. The argument prompted people to brand Lee a racist.

Given the spread of the diaspora, politicians of Indian descent should lead in several countries. But they don’t partly because of indigenous resistance and partly because the colonial power wouldn’t allow it. Guyana was one of the first colonies to choose an ethnic Indian (Cheddi Jagan) to head its government. It’s well known how the people’s mandate was thwarted. When the ethnic Indian Mahendra Chaudhry became Fiji’s Prime Minister in 2000, it was despite a colonial constitution that weighted in favour of native Fijians who were then probably in a minority. The election provoked a coup with Mr Chaudhry held hostage for 56 days in a besieged Parliament House. Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Fiji demonstrated that India doesn’t hold the coup against the island republic.

It’s only in Mauritius that one ethnic Indian has smoothly succeeded another. That is at least partly due to the astuteness with which the first Prime Minister, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, stayed on the right side of the colonial power. He attended every British Labour Party conference and was on first name terms with Harold Wilson and other British leaders. Mauritius made no fuss when London gave away — technically, leased — the Mauritian island of Diego Garcia to the Americans for their Indian Ocean base even though India and other non-aligned nations objected strenuously. Mauritius couldn’t afford to refuse.

At home the British have never imposed the rigorous or discriminatory regulations that were associated with colonialism. Thus, Naoroji was an elected parliamentarian in Westminster long before India’s governance boasted any elective element. The late Niharendu Dutt Majumdar, a Bengali barrister who later became law minister of West Bengal, freely propagated his seditious views in London where he lived for many years before Independence. He was arrested the moment he landed in Calcutta.

Now, Britain is so robustly multiracial that even the popular television series Midsomer Murders, whose author called it “the last bastion of Englishness”, will soon have a permanent Brit-Indian character in the form of a female pathologist played by Manjinder Virk. The feeling is that no British setting is truly representative without a sprinkling of black or brown faces. There are already 11 black or Asian Conservative MPs out of 306 on the Treasury benches. Mr Cameron is justly proud that the number has gone up from only two. Labour, which attracts 16 per cent of the minority vote and is traditionally supported by Afro-Asians, has 16 such MPs.

The Conservatives are fielding 56 black or Asian candidates for the May 7 election and Labour 52. But is numbers all? Ben Okri, the black Booker prize-winning writer, says, “The first freedom is mental freedom for it is possible to be free in the world and unfree in your head.” That sounds great if it’s an exhortation to immigrants to be themselves instead of trying to be carbon copies of a native model. But problems are inevitable if immigrants continue to live by conventional Afro-Asian values and abuse British freedom for personal gain, like Mr Rahman and the others did.

It will be many years before an ethnic outsider can reconcile different value systems, achieve a cultural balance and win sufficient native acceptance to lead either of the two big parties.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author