In the now unlikely event that Rishi Sunak gets elected prime minister of Britain, Pakistan could well lay claim to him if not with quite as much enthusiasm as India currently seems to. Either would be a claim that Sunak is not just keen to discourage, but determined to block out of public discourse.
Rishi Sunak’s family is on the father’s side from Gujranwala from Punjab, now in Pakistan. The family ancestry goes back to Punjab from the mother’s side as well.
That makes Rishi Sunak a full-blown Punjabi, even if we won’t hear that from him, or from his PR team. That PR machine is determined understandably to project him as currently British, and not originally a Punjabi.
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What could be an understandable selection in projection has really become an obliteration. The starting point for the Rishi Sunak story on offer is his parents’ migration from Kenya. It launches straight into arrival of the parents in Britain, to drop roots in Southampton where he was born in 1980.
The PR-projected story would tell us of a hard-up family given opportunities in Britain where he played his own humble part. Some of these Rishi stories have been raised again and again through the present campaigning. Of a father who worked hard to become a simple GP, of a mother who was a pharmacist. Of how Rishi Sunak would go on his bicycle distributing medicines to the needy, a story he has repeated often.
It’s a story of humble origins, humility, and simple service. The projected story is appealing, but not quite accurate.
Privileged
These were no humble origins. The grandfather prospered in Kenya enough to send the father into expensive medical education in Liverpool that the family paid for. He became a GP, not quite the picture of poverty in Britain or even of middle class living; GPs are among the cream earners in Britain.
And the wife did not just study pharmacy, she came to own a pharmacy, a business that can be so lucrative that many families would prefer their children to become pharmacists rather than doctors.
That story of humble origins looks humble only relative to his later wealth. The spell on the bicycle in Southampton was clearly short-lived before a movement into Oxford and Stanford and a post-bicycle into the world of investment finance working with Goldman Sachs and as investment banker in other firms.
And that further dwindles into near insignificance in relation to the wealth of the family Rishi Sunak married into. With close to 1 percent share in Infosys, his wife Akshata Murthy is reported worth a billion dollars through that one source alone.
In an election campaign, the bicycle story was intended to sell him as one humble at heart if not in means. It’s not quite working as intended. Through the campaign stories of Rishi Sunak’s wealth are sticking to him tighter than his obviously Indian appearance and name.
The wealth is not helping gain popularity, his ratings have slipped going by opinion polls. The British like to make money off the world, they don’t much like the wealthy making it in Britain.
Punjab
His Indian name, his Indian appearance, his Hindu faith, the American stamp, the wife’s Indian citizenship, the parental migration from Africa are all outsider enough for someone aspiring to become prime minister of Britain. He doesn’t want now to add Punjab to the publicly viewed potpourri.
And so it is only Indian communities in Britain boasting his Punjabi heritage. Punjabi families from Kenya and Tanzania tell one another stories of the grandparents’ families in Kenya on the father’s side and Tanzania on the mother’s side.
These stories find proud commonality in both families as Khatris from Punjab. They claim Sunak as the Punjabi Khatri who dared, as only Punjabi khatris can. Their boast is not his boast. A letter from the Panjabi Language Awareness Board congratulating him for contesting as a Punjabi went unanswered. He has steadfastly avoided other Punjabi nets thrown at him.
On that potentially Pakistani ownership, not a word either. Pakistan has matched India in claiming the Kohinoor on the ground that in undivided Punjab the diamond was kept in Lahore which of course is now in Pakistan.
The Pakistanis may not look upon Sunak as a diamond, but on that principle, they could claim - some at least could - that his origin is more Pakistani than Indian.
The divide in 1947 set Gujranwala in Punjab on the Pakistani side, it’s now as much Pakistani as is Lahore. The family origin beyond parents goes right back there, and for generations, even if you won’t hear Rishi Sunak saying so.
In Britain where it is now a passion to trace the family tree as far as back as possible, Rishi Sunak has cut the branches of the tree as close to himself as he publicly could. If he does make it to Downing Street, we can be sure he won’t be ordering aloo paranthas for breakfast.
— London Eye is a weekly column by CNBC-TV18’s Sanjay Suri, which gives a peek at business-as-unusual from London and around.
