“It’s almost a watershed moment,” the 31-year-old said as he volunteered at the cavernous dome-topped house of worship that serves the Sikh community in west London's Southall neighborhood.
LONDON — Harmeet Singh Gill was excited to hear that Rishi Sunak would become Britain's first prime minister of color — news that came as he celebrated the Diwali festival in a London neighborhood sometimes called Little India.
The milestone is doubly significant for many people with Asian roots because it comes during Diwali, the five-day festival of light celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and Jains. Numbers have increased steadily since, with 65 people from ethnic minority groups, or 10% of the House of Commons, elected during the last general election in 2019. That still isn’t fully representative of the U.K. as a whole, where 13% of the population identify as ethnic minorities.
The son of a doctor and a pharmacist, Sunak earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford and a master’s in business administration from Stanford University before going to work for Goldman Sachs and then moving into the hedge fund industry, where he made a fortune in finance. He is married to Akshata Murty, daughter of Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder of the global information technology company Infosys.
“But it has to go beyond visible diversity. There have to be young children today from poor homes, going to ordinary state schools, who say that they, too, could become prime minister.” Immigrants of his parents’ generation still remember the white gangs that roamed the streets “looking for West Indians, Africans or Asians to assault,” and coming home to find excrement stuffed through their mailboxes.