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• Bhagvad Gita replaces Bible as Sunak takes oath on India’s ‘Song of Songs’

History was made in Britain on Tuesday, when Defender of the Christian Faith, King Charles the III asked an Indian Hindu to form His Majesty’s Government, becoming the first British monarch to do so in the nation’s thousand-year history.

The unprecedented act came only seven weeks after Queen Elizabeth had, two days before her death, asked Liz Truss to form Her Majesty’s Government, perhaps, the last time, for years to come, before a white native Brit would be bequeathed that honour again.

The day before, as the light of India’s Diwali shone upon the world, a special ray had served to blazon Rishi Sunak in political splendour. It had shone earlier on his personal life. He had been born in England on May 12, 1980; his father, a doctor, had migrated from east Africa; his mother, a chemist, had also come from Africa. They were both Indians of Punjabi descent.  Nothing much is known about them. Sunak studied at Winchester, graduated from Oxford and Stanford. Thereafter he worked in the States as an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs and as a partner in a hedge fund management firm.

GOODNESS GRACIOUS RISHI: Family man Sunak with his wife, Indian billionaire’s daughter, Akshata – worth £500m personally - whom he married in Bangalore in 2009, and two daughters Krishna and Anoushka

In 2009, he had married an Indian heiress, the only daughter of Indian billionaire Murthy, whose conglomerate Infosys was ‘a British government contractor that had made more than $120 million in public sector deals since Sunak entered government’, according to a New York Times report.

Sunak, whose rise had been phenomenal, having entered politics only in 2014, had also held a US Green Card till last October. This, according to the Guardian, meant ‘he had declared himself a ‘permanent US resident’ for tax purposes while he was Chancellor for 19 months and for six years as a British MP’.  There was a further financial scandal to follow. In April it waas revealed that his wife, Akshata, was a ‘non-domiciled UK resident’. It meant she had avoided paying her UK taxes on her international earnings and agreed to do so only after a public outcry.

But all sins were forgiven on October 24th. Diwali’s light had never lit as bright as it did on that night when it haloed Sunak in mystic radiance as the alien Avatar come to save India’s former colonial master, Britain, from doom.

On Monday when things seemed dimmest, the ruling Conservative Party MPs anointed the 42-year-old Indian of first-generation immigrants for Britain’s top job after Liz Truss had quivered the pitch with her radical plan to cut taxes to boost Britain’s economy.

With her 44-day tenure at No 10 ending with her resignation — the shortest period for any British PM — it had fallen on the Conservative Party again to elect another leader. They had done it two months earlier when they ousted Prime Minister Boris Johnson and chosen Truss for the job, discarding Sunak, the other contender, to the bin.

With the leadership again up for grabs, Boris cut short his Caribbean holiday in Barbados and flew back to Britain to throw his hat into the ring but soon pulled it back when it became clear that Tory MPs had rummaged through the rubbish bag to retrieve Sunak’s name from the litter.

It may not have been what rabid colonialist Winston Churchill would have called ‘Britain’s finest hour,’ but it reveals how far down the road she has come in selecting a man for the top job without any hint of discrimination shown to race or religion when faced with no alternative. But does it?

BILLIONAIRE-IN-LAWS: Father- in-law Narayan Murthy, one of India’s richest men with an estimated fortune of over $4 billion, and mother-in-law Sudha Murty at Sunak’s wedding

Does the ‘any port in a storm’ desperation that made Sunak the only choice, signal that Britain has shuffled off its racial coil and become an enlightened land of equality where all colours merge into white? If Sunak’s merits shone so bright, why was he rejected two months ago when a white woman — as English as the English rose — contested the post? Was he the Tories’ last resort when their last white hope withered in her bloom?

It must be noted that Government MPs alone elected Sunak. The other candidate, a woman, Penny Mordaunt — who had 30 backers while more than 200 MPs backed Sunak — was persuaded to drop out. This ruled out the requirement for the entire Conservative Party’s 15,000-strong membership to vote in the election of a new leader. Neither did the public, of course, have any say in the matter.

While the pro-Conservative Daily Mail hailed Sunak’s advent as a ‘New dawn for Britain’ and described Rishi as the country’s ‘youngest modern PM — the first with an Asian heritage’, the rival pro-Labour Daily Mirror asked ‘Who voted for you?’ and said: ‘Yet another Tory takes power without winning a single vote. Richer than the King and clueless about ordinary people.’

Though Sunak is referred as Britain’s youngest PM, he is not. William Pitt, the Younger, became Britain’s Prime Minister in 1783 at the age of 24. But Sunak is easily the richest MP in Parliament. Thanks to father-in-law, he and his heiress wife’s combined fortune is well over 730 million pounds, according to Britain’s Sunday Times Rich List. Would that endear him to the Great British Public?

Would native-born white Britishers, who constitute over 80 percent of the population, have made the same choice at an election as Tory MPs did on Monday in their secret conclaves? Had it been a toss-up between one of their own and a second-generation immigrant Indian, worshiping alien idols, married to the daughter of some billionaire Indian info-tech Maharaj, would they have pitched for their brethren or wagered on an Indian — from an ethnic community less than 3 percent of the total populace — to put the great back into Britain?

It’s a question the entire electorate must answer, and not merely a handful of Government MPs to decide out of sheer political expediency to survive the Truss crisis and to retain their seats for two more years. Only if Sunak is returned at the next polls, can Britain claim credit for being an egalitarian land where, in the words of the Buddha, “only deeds not birth make one a Brahmin.”

For Sunak, it was payback time. Coming from a privileged middle-class background, Britain had given Rishi Sunak an Oxford education, an affluent lifestyle with a magnificent Georgian manor house in Yorkshire, a family home in elite Kensington and now, with the Tory party fellow MPs handing him the keys to No 10, power as Prime Minister. Good for him.

In his thanksgiving speech to the Tories, shortly after they had named him the chosen one, he told them: ‘It is the greatest privilege of my life to be able to serve the party I love and give back to the country I owe so much to.’ He certainly had a lot to be thankful and owes a deep debt of gratitude to the Tory MPs and to Britain, the adopted country of his Indian Panjabi parents. Thankful to Great Britain, for making the world his oyster.

Thankful to Britain, as his ancestors would have been to the British when they came first with trade and then with the sword to harness Indians to the colonial yoke and rule the Indian subcontinent for 89 years from 1858, having made its first foray into Bengal, a hundred years earlier?

Thankful to the British for their hundred-year toil to conquer the many kingdoms that existed in the land mass known as Bharath, before uniting them into a single entity and beginning the era of the British Raj in India? Thankful for dispossessing them of their kings and princes, their nizams and their shahs and, instead, giving them a British empress to pay obeisance, whom none had seen nor heard, inscrutable as the celestial spirits that ruled their fates?

As divinely thankful as his ancestors would have been to the British, for giving them a singular almighty god to worship and a thousand churches to pray in? Thankful, too, for giving British laws to obey and British customs to follow, a foreign tongue to speak in and foreign manners to ape? All done, of course, unasked: the altruistic services bestowed by force upon an enslaved race, too shy to ask.

But, above all, after the British had put India’s sacred cows to slaughter and taken sapphires home as souvenirs, wouldn’t the people have thanked their gods to see the last of the Brits leave their land, even if they, the good Samaritans, left it dismembered into three?

With Sunak’s ascension to rule Britain — euphemistically, ‘lead the nation’ — perhaps it was spiritual India’s way of paying gratitude to the immense service rendered by the British in India to uplift her from poverty and acquaint her with the values of a modern enlightened age.

On the auspicious night of Diwali, India kept her tryst with destiny to finally redeem her debt to the British by transporting — bundled through Africa, flown across the English Channel straight to London — an Indian Rishi, not by force but at the invitation of the British monarch, to govern their skewed isle and uplift it from looming poverty and bring it to the modern age with Indian know-how.

It’s the law of karma as it is the law of physics: Every action has an equal reaction. The British will soon discover whether their rule by force in India was beneficial or evil to the inhabitants by the good or bad results of an outsourced Indian now in Britain, guised in bespoke Saville Row suit, at No 10.

Who are the guilty ‘dual’ MPs? While Britain stuck a stiff upper lip and showed no outward aversion to a second-generation immigrant Indian becoming the nation’s new Prime Minister, the Lankan Parliament expressed its intolerance toward duality when it constitutionally forbade even a Lankan-born native of untold generations, with an indigenous ancestry as old as the hills, from entering the House if he were a dual citizen of any other country. BASIL: Parliament’s feared Phantom A ‘dual citizen’s warrant, reintroduced to the Constitution by 20A after 19A had banned it, was cancelled again by 21A last week. It had been widely seen by some sections in the SLPP, as a malicious attempt to prevent their party’s founder and strong wire, dual American citizen Basil Rajapaksa, from setting foot in the House again. But the net thrown to bait the killer whale has also, it is claimed, caught some sharks and sprats in its mesh. As a result, the collateral damage caused a furore to break out in the House over the unexpected fate that befell these sharks and sprats by the Government’s whaling expedition for Moby Dick. But, unintentionally or not, they have been hauled up and left to die a premature parliamentary death. Surprisingly, with the possible exception of one, they all joined in the search, helping the Government to claim its prey, or stayed away without rocking the boat, seeming to naïvely believe that the ‘all-catch’ net wouldn’t fall on them. Or thought that, with the ‘Government’s common practice of selective law enforcement, they would be thrown back into the water to swim another day. After 21A came into force last Friday, Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe said on Monday that ‘dual citizen ‘MPs can stay in Parliament unless challenged in court. MP Channa Jayasumana of the breakaway SLPP group claimed ten MPs are dual citizens and called for their resignations from Parliament. But none, so far, has come forward to put the dual hat on. Does this mean there is none among the 225 MPs in Parliament who bears no other hat on his pate than his Sri Lankan cap? Or are the guilty so cockily confident they can sail through the next two years without jumping the gun to bare their contraband hats stashed in their closets? The Government’s failure to authorise an enabling mechanism to identify the wearers of dual hats instead of placing the onus on the public, at great expense, much trouble and delay, to prove their guilt in court, strengthens the SLPP claim that, beneath this constitutional exercise, lies the ulterior motive of harpooning solely the whale that threatens the Government’s dominion over the surrounding seas. The rest are sprats that can safely exist, kept in check with the threat of being exposed and condemned to exile, should they step out of line. All this, no doubt, has served to make Basil Rajapaksa somewhat of a martyr. He holds the dubious distinction of being the only Lankan, alive or dead, for whom the constitution was amended thrice. Such was the feared omnipotence of this unholy spirit in the Rajapaksa Trinity that, on all three occasions, he was not even present but merely shuttling between Lanka and the States. The first attempt to prevent the phantom in Parliament was done in 2015. The second, to restore him in the Rajapaksa House of Horrors was done in 2020. Now last Friday, in the Halloween week, the third attempt was made to entomb him again. The vampire’s breast was riven with the 21A stake to deny him resurrection. But will it stop his colony of bats from following his commandments, fiats scurrying out from crypt?