The white & wrong of UK’s Rishism

Is the race card finally in play against Rishi Sunak in the second half of Britain’s six-week general election campaign? Just the dog whistle, not in propah fashion, not enough to provoke some genuine sympathy for the country’s first prime minister of Indian ethnicity, rather than the abundant pity he currently evokes.As of now, all the funereal head-shaking is about Sunak leading “Torysaurus” — the shrunken dinosaur that is Conservative Party — through a political Jurassic Park, which is readying for an “extinction-level” event. It keeps coming | Alternately cast by tabloid pundits as “gaffe machine” or “sleeper agent” of the main opposition Labour, Sunak is subject to daily verbal pummelling for failing to arrest the political decline of a party weary from 14 years in govt. To outward seeming, it’s politics as usual and Sunak is just the unlucky captain of a vessel that started to go down long before he took command 21 months ago.In actual fact, Sunak’s predicament seems unlike that of any other politician of a major British party said to be headed for a major election defeat. Oddly for a British born-and-bred man, he is deemed an outsider and a rootless cosmopolitan, and is almost always predicted to be unlikely to stay on in Britain or its politics should his party lose. Faced with race-baiting commentary, he is either unable or unwilling to call it out because he is supposed to be the face of a rainbow nation with British characteristics.He is not one of us | A case in point is the fallout from Sunak’s ill-advised early exit from an international commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, one of the turning points of 20th century history and World War II. When Britain learnt that Sunak had skipped a June 6 event in France attended by Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, in favour of a TV interview back home, it was as if he had been found butchering babies. The commentariat as well as radio and TV talk shows erupted in fury.But it was left to Nigel Farage, champion of Donald Trump, Brexit firebrand and newly installed leader of the right-wing Eurosceptic Reform UK party, to say the unsayable. That Sunak “has no sense of our history, or feeling genuinely for the culture”, that he wasn’t “patriotic” and that his “instinct” is not the same as the British people’s because he’s “utterly disconnected in every way”.Other than some half-hearted protests about dog whistles from a few politicians, Farage’s commentary on Sunak’s moment of shame was allowed to stand.The racist overtones in that judgment seemed to be on a par with an earlier incident revolving around roots and reflexive instincts, when a quite different English politician delivered a damning verdict on another non-White politician, though from across the Atlantic. Back in 2016, Boris Johnson wrote a newspaper column saying Barack Obama’s removal of a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office was driven by the US president’s “part-Kenyan” ancestry. He added that this act was seen by some as a sign of an “ancestral dislike of the British Empire”. Though, like Farage, Johnson wasn’t UK prime minister at the time, he was hardly a political nobody. As for Obama, like Sunak, he too seemed to symbolise a new post-racial politics. Except that it isn’t.There and not there | Britain has moved quite some way towards an inclusive politics from the charged immigration debates of the late 1960s and the infamous “rivers of blood” speech of Enoch Powell, but Sunak’s rise to Downing Street was no post-racial moment. There is euphemistic racism, just as attended Sunak’s election to parliament nine years ago from an ultra-safe Conservative seat in Yorkshire. At the time, his prospective constituents offered comments that went heavy on the curry theme: “Just tell him ya’ don’t like curry”. “That MP he’ll be doing curry night every night”. What they were saying, of course, had nothing to do with food but perception of belonging.Sunak hasn’t helped matters | Interestingly, in his scant decade in frontline British politics, Sunak himself has contributed nothing meaningful to the debate about racism other than to declare it “unacceptable”. Before the election was called, he acknowledged the racism he experienced as a child, his mother’s determination that he and his siblings “didn’t speak with accents (but) properly”, his parents’ determination their Indian heritage not be “a barrier…in any way, shape or form” and that their children should “fit in”.That, he has done, in quintessentially understated British fashion. And he was fortunate to find political prominence at a time when British politics either ignored or minimised race, thereby relegating it to a hidden transcript.Like Schrödinger’s cat, the nearly century-old thought experiment in which the hypothetical feline in its sealed box could be considered simultaneously alive and dead, Sunak’s situation may suggest that racist and post-racist realities both flourish at the same time.Lall is based in London and writes on international affairs.