On the day Rishi Sunak rose to the prime ministership of Great Britain, a long-time Parsi resident of London, Rusi Dalal, mailed me to say this historic event happened in a year that rhymes with another Indo-United Kingdom (UK) landmark moment.
This year, 2022, marks the 130th anniversary of the election, in 1892, of the first person of Indian origin to the House of Commons. Dadabhai Naoroji (September 4, 1825-June 30, 1917). Hailed as the Grand Old Man of India, Naoroji was a Parsi by birth, a Mumbaikar by upbringing, a teacher (of Gujarati) by calling, a scholar by aptitude, an economist by training, a philosopher by natural bent, a Londoner by extended domicile, a politician by instinct, a leader by history’s design. And what a leader!
Dinyar Patel’s masterly biography of the great man, Dadabhai Naorji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, tells us of how the 67-year-old Indian who made a name for himself as one of the founders of the Indian National Congress in 1885, and a Liberal politician, contested the Holborn seat the very next year.
Holborn, a strongly Conservative area, defeated the Indian liberal. The then Conservative Prime Minister (PM) Lord Salisbury famously or, rather, notoriously said that Britain was not yet ready to elect a Black man. The description offended all men and women of taste in both countries. But Naoroji was undeflected from his aim to enter Parliament in London and speak for the underdog, for women (who had not yet got the vote), for the elderly, for Irish Home Rule and the end of Britain’s economic exploitation of its largest and most populous colony, India. Naoroji, who had already served as the second president of the Indian National Congress (from 1886 to 1887) and was going to do so again, from 1893 to 1894 and 1906 to 1907, not only found no contradiction but a felicity in being politically active and “office-holding” in both countries.
In 1892, he moved to the largely working class constituency of Central Finsbury, and defeated, very narrowly, the Conservative candidate. Naoroji was elected to the House of Commons by three votes (some estimates put the margin, post-recount, to five) giving Naoroji the hilariously accurate and alliterative moniker of “narrow majority”. To be strictly accurate — something Naoroji’s rectitude would demand — he was the second Member of Parliament (MP) of Asian descent, coming after the Eurasian MP David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, who was unseated for bribery during his campaign in Sudbury, Suffolk, nine months after getting elected.
Before his Finsbury win, Naoroji met a young student of law in Inner Temple, 23-year-old Mohandas K Gandhi, and left an everlasting impact on the future leader. He also met another aspiring lawyer then enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn — 16-year-old Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who was to serve for a while as Naoroji’s secretary. Jinnah had the distinction of hearing Naoroji’s maiden speech in the House of Commons from the Visitors’ Gallery.
As a Liberal MP in the House of Commons between 1892 and 1895, Naoroji made more than a mark. He cut a swathe of influence with his eloquence, his punctilious regard for factual documentation, his deep study of Britain’s draining of Indian wealth, and for his complete freedom from racial bias, sectarian tilting and personal animosities. By all that he so forcibly argued in Parliament, Naoroji came to represent, vicariously, the mass of humanity that his mentee Gandhi termed as “India’s dumb millions”.
Conservative in terms of party affiliation and conservative in terms of political belief, Sunak has little in common with Naoroji other than an India-touched firstness. But there can be no denying the aptness of Dalal’s enthusiastic mail about the India-descended 42-year-old becoming PM and India-born Naoroji becoming MP in rhyming years — 1892 and 2022.
We rejoice in Sunak, in the fact of him, as we did in the fact of Kamala Harris on that half-Tamil United States (US) national becoming the vice-president of the US. But no one can envy the young man. Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labour Party, said “Rishi Sunak has been crowned by Tory MPs. He has no mandate and the British people have had no say.” And, in her sharp tweet, she sign-posted “general elections”. If Sunak has indeed been crowned, it is a crown of thorns. He has an economic mess to clear.
But he has to do things beyond setting Britain right. Most importantly, he has to do something that needs not just the fire of youth, but the light of truth to address the globe’s climate crisis. Naoroji’s seminal Poverty and un-British Rule appeared in 1901. It turned “British” from a noun to an adjective, challenging the country of his adoption to give “being British” a moral height by stopping the immiseration of its great colony, India. At the COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Sunak has a great opportunity to announce British decisions which, by example, and not just promises, can slow down the polluting and heating-up of planet Earth.
Sunak’s is, like Naoroji’s, a narrow majority. But if the Grand Old Man of India, despite that handicap, could challenge Britain to be British and do right by India’s political economy, so can the new PM challenge Britain to give a great “British” lead to do right by the world’s climate.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former diplomat
The views expressed are personal
