Sunday Times 2
Are Churchill’s predictions on Indians made 75 years ago valid?
View(s):To Indians who long to be ‘the greatest on earth’, Diwali (Deepawali to Sri Lankans) on Monday was the most joyous day in recent times.
At the Melbourne Cricket Grounds — packed with 90,000 fanatical Indians and Pakistanis screaming their heads off– India not only beat their rivals in the last ball of the game but also coronated their man whom they wanted to be ‘King’, since they had dethroned their maharajahs, as ‘King Kohli’.
While the descendants of the fourth and subsequent generations whom the British had scattered over their empire as indentured labour, were dancing on the streets across the world from the Caribbean to the Pacific islands, an event of greater significance than what happened on that day of the MCG victory, took place in London. Rishi Sunak, a migrant of Indian descent was elected the head of the Conservative Party, the preserve of English aristocracy, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Anticipating the burst of Indian pride and nationalism through its media, we switched on to the Indian NDTV channel and witnessed an ecstatic anchorwoman and flashing headlines with blaring music playing: ‘Indian Son rises over the Empire’. The more restrained Times of India headline had been: UK rings in Rishi raj on Diwali.
Jubilant Indians in this moment of ecstasy even forgot another great recent achievement of migrant Indians. A daughter of Tamil Nadu, Kamala Devi Harris was already the Vice-President of the only superpower in the world.
Online Indian media were proclaiming that Rishi Sunak and his wife were richer than the King of England, the recently proclaimed King Charles III of Great Britain!
With all this — the sons and daughters of ‘rising over the empire’ — we were wondering in our armchair — where Sri Lanka, also a former colony of the British Empire like India, was placed after this post-Diwali euphoric resurgence.
Indians lording over Lanka is nothing new. Our last king, Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe, was a descendant of the Nayakkars who were located somewhere in today’s Tamil Nadu, and before him, there were one or two Nayakkar kings of Lanka. Of course, the geopolitics of the times was different. Lanka was an independent state at that time though with a foreign monarch and India comprised many ‘Rajs’ under Maharajas, who were considered supreme leaders and the Islamic states ruled by invaders.
The British put together these separate states and other conquered independent areas stretching from Afghanistan to Burma and down south to Lanka to make India the Jewel in the British Crown. This, we are aware, is an over-simplistic explanation of what happened but perhaps underlies the reasoning of Winston Churchill when he declared: ‘India is a geographical term; it is no more a united nation than the equator’.
In Mumbai, an Indian art school teacher paints a picture of new British prime minister Rishi Sunak. AFP
The rise of the Indian son Rishi Sunak over the former British Empire right into the Premier’s seat at the Westminster parliament has become an occasion to make those who belittled India when a colony eat their own words. Churchill’s remarks on the eve of Indian independence have become grist to the mill for the British Empire bashers.
Billionaire Indian businessman Anandan Mahendra has Tweeted Churchill’s comment made in 1947 on the cusp of Indian independence. ‘If independence is granted to India, power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly heads. They will fight among themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles. A day will come when even air and water would be taxed in India.’
Mahendran’s Tweet has received over 70,000 likes and 10,000 retweets. The Indian businessman had also listed top Indian-origin CEOs in America.
Churchill, no doubt, had not foreseen events that could happen 75 years after his predictions such as the emergence of a British citizen of Indian origin becoming the PM of the United Kingdom. But if one looks at the membership of the Lok Sabha or even the Rajya Sabha doesn’t his predictions come very close?
Churchill’s prediction of the day when Indians would be ‘taxed for their air and water’ came true on that ecstatic day of Diwali in the Indian capital, New Delhi. The lighting of millions of oil lamps for Diwali results and the burning of agricultural waste in the provinces surrounding it have resulted in it becoming the most polluted city in the world. And it happened again on Monday.
On the Churchillian prediction of the quality of leadership, the journal India Today reported that 50 percent of MPs elected to Lok Sabha in 2019 have criminal records. Of the 539 winners analysed, 233 MPs have declared criminal cases against them. This was an increase of 44 percent in the number of MPs declaring criminal cases against MPs in 2005. BJP MPs amount to 55 percent facing criminal charges. About 31 percent of Rajya Sabha MPs have criminal charges against them.
Rishi Sunak (42) is undoubtedly a person of great intellectual ability, determination, foresight and tremendous amount of luck. He and his wife (daughter of an Indian billionaire) have been ranked the 222nd richest in Britain. Sunak’s family has been of very humble origin from Punjab whose grandfathers had migrated to Nairobi and Tanganyika (Tanzania), both working for the British imperialists. Sunak’s father and mother migrated to Britain in the 1980s. The father, a doctor, worked for the NHS and the mother owned a pharmacy in Southampton.
Sunak was educated at Winchester, a famed public school in Britain, his parents could hardly afford the cost of his education. Sunak became the Head Boy of Winchester, went to Oxford for his degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and to Stanford University on a Fulbright Award for an MBA. He worked for Goldman Sachs and later for hedge fund firms. His rise in politics on being elected to the House of Commons in 2015 has been phenomenal — in seven years — to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer and finally to Prime Minister through the turbulent periods of Brexit and the Covid pandemic though not without very strong critics.
While he faces daunting challenges to continue as the Prime Minister for the next two years his greatest task appears to be a mission impossible: Pull Britain out of the severe economic debacle.
Those wildly cheering Indians of the ‘Indian Son who rose over the British Empire’ should ask themselves the question: If Rishi Sunak contests the leadership in India on the same policies of the British Conservative Party which he parrots and implements, would he be elected as the prime minister of India?
(The writer is a former editor of The Sunday Island, The Island, and consultant editor of the
Sunday Leader. He can be contacted at gamma.weerakoon@gmail.com)