Rishi Sunak: from a Southampton surgery to No. 10
Part 1 of Power Abroad. The grandson of Punjabi migrants became the United Kingdom's first British Indian prime minister — and lit Diwali lamps on the steps of Downing Street.
Power Abroad — Part 1.
The Indian diaspora's rise is most visible where power is. Across the West and the old indenture colonies, people of Indian origin now sit in cabinets and presidential palaces. This series profiles them — and it opens with the man who reached the top of British politics.
A three-continent journey
Rishi Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton, on England's south coast — but his family's road there ran through East Africa. His paternal grandfather left Gujranwala (in present-day Pakistan) for Nairobi in 1935; his maternal grandfather moved from Ludhiana, in Indian Punjab, to Tanzania. Both of Sunak's parents came to Britain in 1966, part of the twice-migrant South Asian wave that moved from the subcontinent to Africa and then to the United Kingdom. His father was a GP; his mother ran a local pharmacy — the small-business, professional immigrant story in its classic form.
Winchester, Oxford, Stanford
He was educated at Winchester College, read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford (a first, in 2001), and took an MBA at Stanford as a Fulbright Scholar in 2006. In California he met Akshata Murty, whom he married in 2009 — the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, one of India's signature technology companies. It is a marriage that ties the British prime minister's household directly to the Indian business establishment.
The fast climb
After a career in finance, Sunak entered Parliament in 2015 as MP for Richmond in Yorkshire. His ascent was startlingly quick: Chancellor of the Exchequer by February 2020, steering the economy through the pandemic, and then, on 25 October 2022, Prime Minister — the first British Asian, and first Hindu, to hold the office, and at 42 the youngest since 1812.
Hindu in Downing Street
Sunak has been openly observant in a way no predecessor was. He has spoken of taking his parliamentary oath on the Bhagavad Gita, and as Chancellor he lit Diwali lamps on the steps of Downing Street — images that travelled around the Indian-origin world as a marker of arrival. For millions in the diaspora, the symbolism was the substance: a brown, Hindu son of immigrants at the very centre of the former imperial power.
The verdict, and the meaning
His premiership was short. It ended on 5 July 2024, after the Conservatives lost the general election to Labour — a defeat that placed him among the shortest-serving modern prime ministers and one whose record voters judged harshly. But this series is not a scorecard of policy; it is a map of where the diaspora has reached. And whatever history makes of his government, the bare fact remains remarkable: within two generations, a family that crossed three continents with little produced the person who governed Britain.
That is the pattern Power Abroad will trace — from Washington to Lisbon to Port of Spain — the diaspora's steady, improbable arrival at the top table.
Next in the series: Kamala Harris and the Indian thread in American power.
Sources: Wikipedia: Rishi Sunak.
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