Brown & Cruella À La Suella

What do Britain’s Braverman and America’s Vivek Ramaswamy say about brown leaders in the West? They can be as majoritarian as a white. And tickbox diversity can be pretty shallow

Call it the Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and Vivek Ramaswamy effect but it’s pretty hard right now to take pride in some of the more prominent politicians of Indian ethnicity who’re in the news on either side of the Atlantic.

Sunak, Britain’s first prime minister of Indian ethnicity, is seen as the most right-wing Conservative prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, instinctively hewing away from the political centre on testy issues such as asylum-seekers, devolution, climate change, Brexit and the currently piteous plight of Gaza’s people.
Until this week, when Sunak sacked Braverman as home secretary, she was the second woman of Indian heritage to serve in one of Britain’s highest offices of state. In her scant year in office, she distinguished herself chiefly in the role of “the most hated woman in British politics”, inciting communal division and disdaining all lament at the deaths of innocent Palestinians.

Read full story on TOI+

Originally published at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com