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.
On 25 October 2022 — by coincidence, the day after Diwali — Rishi Sunak walked into 10 Downing Street as the first person of colour, and the first Hindu, ever to serve as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. A year earlier, as Chancellor, he had lit Diwali diyas on the steps of his official residence. That a practising Hindu, the grandson of Punjabi migrants, now held the highest office in the land that once ruled India was a symbolic turn few would have predicted a generation ago.
The arc of arrival
Sunak's story is a textbook of immigrant mobility. His grandparents came from Punjab; his parents were born in East Africa and migrated to Britain in the 1960s, part of the great wave of South Asians who moved from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to the UK. His father was a National Health Service GP and his mother ran a local pharmacy — the respectable, hard-working professional class that the first British-Indian generation so often built. Rishi, born in Southampton in 1980, was their eldest child.
The making of a high-flyer
What followed was an almost frictionless ascent through the British elite. Sunak was educated at Winchester College, one of the country's oldest private schools, then read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford and took an MBA at Stanford. He worked at Goldman Sachs and then for hedge funds, accumulating real wealth before he ever entered politics — a background that would later make him one of the richest people ever to lead the country.
A marriage of two elites
At Stanford he met Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of the Indian IT giant Infosys, and the author and philanthropist Sudha Murty. Her stake in Infosys — just under one per cent — made her, on paper, wealthier than the late Queen. The union joined a British-Indian success story to Indian corporate royalty, and the couple's fortune would become a recurring theme of Sunak's career.
Chancellor in the storm
Sunak entered Parliament in 2015 as MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, and rose with startling speed. In February 2020, just as the pandemic struck, Boris Johnson made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was Sunak who designed the vast furlough scheme that paid the wages of millions of locked-down workers, a programme that briefly made "Dishy Rishi" one of the most popular politicians in Britain. His shine dulled amid the "Partygate" scandal and a row over his wife's non-domiciled tax status, which let her avoid UK tax on overseas income until she voluntarily gave it up.
Into Number 10
His path to the top ran through the chaos of 2022. Johnson fell; Liz Truss won the leadership over Sunak, then imploded in just forty-nine days after a disastrous mini-budget. Sunak was installed in October 2022 by Conservative MPs, without a general election — Britain's third prime minister in a single year. He inherited an economy in turmoil and a party exhausted by scandal.
A Hindu in Downing Street
For India and the global Indian diaspora, the symbolism was electric. Sunak is openly a practising Hindu who does not eat beef, and who had taken his oath as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita. He spoke of his faith without embarrassment and lit Diwali lamps at the heart of the British state. Newspapers in Delhi and Mumbai celebrated the descendant of colonised Indians governing the former imperial power; for British Hindus, it was a moment of unmistakable arrival.
Symbol versus substance
Yet the symbolism sat awkwardly with the politics. Sunak led a Conservative government that pursued austerity, a hard line on immigration, and the controversial plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda — policies many British Asians found alienating. His ascent proved that the top job was now open to a person of Indian heritage; it did not mean that Britain's minorities saw his government as their own. Representation, his premiership showed, is not the same thing as solidarity.
The fall
The reckoning came quickly. In July 2024 Sunak led the Conservatives into a general election and suffered one of the worst defeats in the party's history, handing power to Keir Starmer's Labour. He served briefly as Leader of the Opposition before stepping down as party leader, remaining in Parliament as an MP.
The verdict
However the political ledger reads, the milestone stands. For the first time, the grandson of Punjabi migrants — a Hindu who lit Diwali lamps on Downing Street — governed the United Kingdom. It was the highest pinnacle the Indian diaspora has reached in British public life, and a marker of how far, in three generations, a family that crossed from Punjab to East Africa to England had climbed.
Continue the series · Power Abroad
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