What Britain’s Braverman, US' Vivek Ramaswamy say about brown leaders in the West

Call it the Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and Vivek Ramaswamy effect but it’s pretty hard right now to take pride in some of the more prominent politicians of Indian ethnicity who’re in the news on either side of the Atlantic.Sunak, Britain’s first prime minister of Indian ethnicity, is seen as the most right-wing Conservative prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, instinctively hewing away from the political centre on testy issues such as asylum-seekers, devolution, climate change, Brexit and the currently piteous plight of Gaza’s people.Until this week, when Sunak sacked Braverman as home secretary, she was the second woman of Indian heritage to serve in one of Britain’s highest offices of state. In her scant year in office, she distinguished herself chiefly in the role of “the most hated woman in British politics”, inciting communal division and disdaining all lament at the deaths of innocent Palestinians.And Ramaswamy, the US-born biotech billionaire son of Malayali white-collar immigrants, is running to be the Republican Party’s nominee for president. He is considered to have rabid and extreme positions on almost every issue that keeps the guardrails of American domestic and foreign policy on track. ShowBlurbsAll three check the box for the sort of “tickbox diversity” that Sunak’s spokespeople claimed on November 13 to disavow. As brown-skinned children of immigrants, the trio might be seen as emblems of racial and cultural acceptance, aspiration and achievement under the chilly skies of the northern hemisphere countries in which their parents or grandparents made their home. But all are the sort who seem to want, nay exult in the spectacle of “tofu-eating, wokerati” spluttering into their chickpea curry in the UK, US and further afield. Those were Braverman’s words, seemingly channelling Cruella de Vil sans the white mink cloak, 13 months ago in parliament as she argued to legally curtail eco-activists’ right to protest.medium105249431Ramaswamy, who wrote a book titled Woke Inc, flashes his pearly whites on televised debates as he compares the “woke left” to “psychological slavery”. And Sunak has been equally derisory about “woke nonsense”, even appointing a new minister for common sense in his latest cabinet reshuffle reportedly to lead the anti-woke agenda. He has also slammed “lefty lawyer(s)” who impede his government’s controversial policy to fly migrants to Rwanda for the crime of daring to seek asylum in the UK.As Britain’s highest court decides on the issue, there is every sign that Sunak’s Conservative government is leading an increasingly fashionable European dash down the same route of outsourcing asylum claimants to poorer countries. Last week, Germany said it saw some merit in a similar UK-style plan. So has Austria. After Sunak and his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni forced the political right’s favoured hot-button issue – migration – onto the agenda of an historic European leaders’ meeting last month, Italy signed a deal to build offshore migrant detention centres in Albania.It may seem ironic that Sunak (and until recently, Braverman) is steering Europe towards brutal policies that flout international law on human rights and have the far right singing hosannas. But then Braverman has refused to be “patronised” by the notion “that a person’s skin colour should dictate their political views” and Sunak has joked about compliments for his “tan”.What does this say about the timbre of these Indian diasporic politicians’ character? British Pakistani Conservative politician Sayeeda Warsi pointed out in the context of one of Braverman’s slurs against the UK’s Pakistani community that “black and brown people can be racist too.” Then there’s the telltale tendency to attack vegetarianism and woke-ism as a sign of being so “lefty” as to be limp-wristed, which is to say weak. The tofu dietary reference is seen to indicate the inability of people at the other end of the spectrum to rejoice in the red meat of cruel political choices.It’s worth considering what those might be for politicians whose schtick appears to revolve around a subtle denial of their identity even as they expediently embrace selected ethnic and majoritarian strands. In the process, of course, the essential concept is lost, of vasudhaiva kutumbakam or the world is one family.Once upon a time, it was thought notable for someone of Indian origin to win an election as mayor or member of parliament in the West, and a dizzying triumph if they were tipped for or attained more high-profile jobs. But now, ethnic Indians are in senior positions in business, academia, politics and policy in the West.A Johns Hopkins study recently counted 25 chief executives at S&P 500 companies, the World Bank chief, three deans of leading US business schools, 19 people in Britain’s House of Commons, six in the Australian parliament and five in the US Congress along with vice-president Kamala Harris who was raised by a Tamil mother.Also in the US, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, a Punjabi kudi, is making progress and trying to bridge divides. So too Leo Varadkar, the half-Indian prime minister of Ireland.Perhaps the politics of Sunak, Braverman and Ramaswamy symbolises nothing more profound than the banality of ambition.The writer is based in London and writes on international affairs