LONDON, 25 Oct 2022:
Around three centuries ago, the British came to colonise India. Now the reverse irony has occurred with Akshata Murthy, wife of Rishi Sunak – the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister-designate of the UK.
Sunak today said he would prioritise economic stability but forewarned of “difficult decisions” as he took over as the UK’s prime minister, the country’s third in two months.
“I will place economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government’s agenda. This will mean difficult decisions to come,” the ruling Conservative Party’s new leader said in a national address delivered outside Downing Street, his official residence in central London.
He inherits an economy on the verge of recession and a party cleft apart by ideological differences.
“Right now our country is facing a profound economic crisis,” he said, adding that he would face the challenges with the “compassion” he showed during his time as chancellor of the exchequer – the UK equivalent to a finance minister – during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a period when he rose to public prominence under Boris Johnson.
“The government I lead will not leave the next generation, your children and grandchildren, with a debt to settle that we were too weak to pay ourselves.”
Sunak is the first British prime minister from an ethnic minority as well as the first non-white, Hindu and the youngest premier since the 18th century, at the age of 42.
His ascent to power, which comes amid a political crisis in the country and its economy staring at a recession, was hailed in several political quarters in India, including a greeting by India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi.
As Sunak won the race to lead the Conservative Party yesterday, coinciding with the Hindu festival of Diwali, Modi tweeted that he had become the “living bridge” of British Indians as they transformed “our historic ties into a modern partnership.”
Many other Indian personalities marked the occasion with a sense of sweet anti-colonial revenge, as a person of Indian origin has risen to power in London 75 years after India gained independence from the UK/
The chairman of Indian carmaker Mahindra group, Anand Mahindra recalled a statement that former UK PM Winston Churchill made about Indian politicians in 1947, the year of India’s independence.
“In handing over the Government of India to these so-called political classes we are handing over to men of straw, of whom, in a few years, no trace will remain,” Churchill had famously said, a statement that was widely shared in the South Asian country.
Over 75 years, ties between the two countries have gradually matured away from postcolonial tensions, and currently they are close allies, especially in the sphere of security and trade.
Sunak’s wife is a designer and heir to a tech business empire in India, having courted controversy over a fiscal statute that allowed her to not pay taxes on her million-dollar dividends from her father’s company.
Murthy has a net worth of around £730 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2022 – mainly due to her shares in the Indian information technology giant Infosys, co-founded by her father N Narayana Murthy in the 1980s.
Narayana Murthy “helped craft a new image of India as a land of pioneering start-ups and vast call centres,” James Crabtree writes in his book The Billionaire Raj, including the engineer in a generation of businessman “admired as models of social mobility and ethical practice.”
Married to author, engineer and philanthropist Sudha Murthy, Narayana said in an public letter in 2013 that it was her who taught Akshata and her brother Rohan “the importance of simplicity and austerity.”
“You would often ask me why there was no television at our home when the rest of your friends discussed stuff they watched on TV. Your mother decided early on that there would be no TV in our home so that there would be time for things like studying, reading, discussions,” he wrote in the letter to his daughter.
Akshata was born in 1980 in the city of Hubli, in the southern state of Karnataka and except a short period with her parents in Mumbai – India’s financial capital – she spent the initial years of life in the small Karnataka town with her grandparents.
However, the fashion designer – who established a label that carries her name – prefers to describe herself in the bio section of her website as “born and brought up in Bengaluru,” the capital of Karnataka and the epicenter of India’s IT industry where Infosys is headquartered.
Akshata left India in 1998 to study in the Claremont McKenna College in the US before beginning a career in finance in California.
As per her bio, Akshata completed an MBA from Stanford in 2007, and again worked in the finance and marketing sector before launching her own clothes line.
It was in Stanford that she met Rishi Sunak – grandson of immigrants from India’s Punjab region – who is set to become the next British PM.
They married in Bengaluru in 2009 and have two daughters: Krishna and Anoushka.
Narayana Murthy says he found the British politician “brilliant, handsome, and, most importantly, honest” in their first meeting.
After Sunak was elected the leader of the Conservative Party yesterday following the resignation of incumbent PM Liz Truss, the senior Murthy told reporters he was “proud of him and wish him success.”
After Boris Johnson resigned as UK prime minister in July, Akshata came under the media scanner while her husband vied for the top post in the party and the country, with the controversy affecting Sunak’s chances as his wife was painted as a millionaire with no regard for the public good.
It was revealed that Akshata was receiving annual dividends of around £11.6 million from Infosys without paying taxes on them in Britain due to her non-domicile status, a loophole often used by foreign millionaires for not declaring income generated outside the country.
Murthy tried to quell the criticism by telling BBC that from now on she would pay taxes in the UK over her income, although insisting her tax record so far has been “completely legal.”
– EFE