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Rishi Sunak Shows What India Is Missing

Rishi Sunak Shows What India Is Missing

The British people may be counting on Prime Minister

Rishi Sunak

to rescue their Covid-battered economy from its recent troubles. But the former

Goldman Sachs

banker’s elevation to his nation’s highest elected office earlier this week matters outside the U.K. too.

As Tunku Varadarajan noted in these pages this week, for India, Mr. Sunak’s ancestral homeland, British democracy offers valuable lessons in how to accommodate religious and racial diversity. In the Anglophone West, Mr. Sunak’s ascendance may accelerate a process already in motion in the U.K.—the end of the overwhelming advantage leftist parties long enjoyed among ethnic minority voters.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Sunak’s story strikes a chord with Indians. His rise from the middle class—his father was a doctor, his mother a pharmacist—to the pinnacle of political power has a fairy-tale quality. As the first nonwhite British prime minister, and at 42 the youngest in more than 200 years, Mr. Sunak has entered the history books even before he’s had a chance to show what sort of legacy he’ll leave.

The new prime minister is a practicing Hindu who was sworn in as an MP on the

Bhagavad Gita,

and has recalled his pride at lighting diyas (traditional earthen lamps) on Diwali in front of 11 Downing Street in his previous job as chancellor of the Exchequer. He is a self-confessed teetotaler “Coke addict” (the beverage) who forswears beef. As a symbol of devotion, he wears a red thread on his right wrist. He is married to the daughter of tech billionaire N.R.

Narayana Murthy,

a household name in India.

Much of the Indian response to Mr. Sunak has been playful. On social media you can find memes of James Bond ordering a martini in Hindi and others that swap Mr. Sunak’s photo for a look-alike, former Indian cricketer Ashish Nehra. But some Indian commentary carries an edge of ugly ethnic triumphalism. Prominent former Indian diplomat Kanwal Sibal tweeted about the “poetic justice” of an Indian leading the nation that once colonized India. An op-ed in the Deccan Herald spoke approvingly of “reverse cultural colonisation of the U.K.” by Indian immigrants.

In reality, India, which borrowed Westminster-style parliamentary democracy from Britain, still has much to learn about political representation…

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