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After the historic win of the Indian cricket team in Melbourne, comes the news that Britain is going to have a ‘desi’ Prime Minister.  It’s a double Diwali gift for India. Earlier, we had come to know of a lady Vice President of Indian origin being elected for the United States. India, it seems, is spreading its wings round the world!

 But the initial exuberance and the ‘feel-good’ factor should end there. Rishi Sunak first of all is a British citizen, even though his parents might have migrated to the UK and he may be having an Indian wife, who happens to be the daughter of Narayan Murthy, the founder of Infosys. Rishi’s first concern will be Britain and its terrible economic conditions, and not India.

Britain’s manufacturing and services indexes have fallen sharply. Inflation is on the rise. The credit rating agency Moody’s has changed Britain’s ‘outlook’ to negative. Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss’s tax reforms turned the London Stock Market upside down and the sterling pound is on the decline. In his first public comments after the announcement that he will be the next prime minister of England, Sunak said: “There is no doubt we face profound economic challenges. We now need stability and unity, and I will make it my utmost priority to bring my party and country together.”

Sunak’s grandparents may have migrated from India to Africa and from there his parents moved to the UK; but Sunak had the best British education, graduating from Oxford and then from Stanford. He rose quickly from a Conservative MP to become the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of 39 and now the prime minister at 42, possibly the youngest PM in British history. The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed him as the ‘living bridge’ between India and the UK while Sashi Tharoor, the bitter critic of the British Empire, expressed surprise saying “Britain has done something very rare in the world – to place a member of a visible minority in the most powerful office.”

Within Britain, the reactions are mixed. Some say how can there be a change in the prime ministership without a proper election? Others explain that there has been a major shift in the British parliamentary system in recent times. The rise and fall of Liz Truss, Britain’s six-week prime minister who resigned on Thursday, embodies a seismic and long-mounting change in British politics, though its cause and consequences may not always be obvious. She was only the fourth British leader to win the job through a particularly American practice newly common in her country: a party primary.

As in most parliamentary democracies, British parties, for most of their history, chose their leaders, and therefore the prime minister, through a poll of party officials. But in recent elections Britain has shifted that power to party bases, which now select party leaders in elections somewhat like those held in the United States for party nominations. As his predecessor, Sunak also takes advantage of this change in the British political system: the introduction of the primaries as in the US.

The new prime minister faces an uphill task. He will possibly have to review the Brexit policy which has been suicidal. His own Conservative party is sharply divided on this issue. The effects of Britain’s detachment from the European Union are there for all to see. There has been a change in the monarchy in Britain and now in the legislature. Men of ‘colour’ have been changing business rules of western corporations for quite some time now; will the world now see change in a major European country’s economy  through a ‘desi’ ?