Bhubaneswar: Rishi Sunak will be first Britain’s prime minister of colour, the first Hindu, and the youngest since William Pitt. He is the third Conservative prime minister in under two months and the fifth in six years.
His journey from MP to prime minister in just seven years is faster than any other PM in the modern era. He will be handed the key to Downing Street and appointed as the new PM after he meets King Charles III at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday.
His Indian roots:
>> When he was elected a Member of Parliament from Richmond, Yorkshire, he took oath on the Bhagwat Gita and became the first UK parliamentarian to do so. When he was criticised for his extravagant expenditures in the summer of 2022 while campaigning for the PM’s post, he shared that this revered Hindu text often rescues him during stressful situations.
>> Sunak’s parents are of Indian descent. His family hails from Punjab and his grandfather migrated with his family to East Africa for a better life. When trouble brewed in East Africa in the 1960s, his parents migrated to then Great Britain. His father Yashvir Sunak, was a National Health Service general practitioner and mother, Usha Sunak, ran a chemist shop.
>> The new UK PM married Infosys chief Narayan Murthy’s daughter Akshata Murthy in August 2009 and the couple are parents to two daughters – Krishna and Anoushka. He visits Bangalore with his wife and two children often to meet his in-laws. “We are confident he will do his best for the people of the United Kingdom,” Narayana Murthy was quoted as saying by ANI.
>> Sunak lit Diwali diyas at his residence on Downing Street when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris Johnson’s leadership.
>> Like any Indian household, education was a key aspect of parenting in the Sunak household and he often speaks of how his family reminded him often about values and culture.
>> A Stanford University graduate and a former investment banker, the 42-year-old likes to play cricket to keep fit.
Notably, Sunak has a net worth of over 700 million pounds and is richer than the King, whose personal wealth was estimated at about $460 million by the 2021 Sunday Times Rich List. His wife owns a fashion label, Akshata Designs. She works with artists in remote villages to create Indian-meets-Western fusion clothes that are “vehicles to discovering Indian culture”. Her stake in Infosys is worth around $700 million. She is also the director of Murthy’s investment firm Catamaran Ventures in the UK.
The couple owns a mansion in Yorkshire, a 7 million-pound five-bedroom house in Kensington, London and a flat in Santa Monica, California.
