I have just found in the Financial Times the answer, or a possible answer, to something that I had been asking myself for a long time: is it normal that so little is said about the fact that the presidents of the United Kingdom, Scotland, Ireland, and the mayor of London, Are they all descended from families from the Indian subcontinent?
Let's see: Rishi Sunak was born in Southampton, where his parents, Indians, had emigrated from Africa; Leo Varadkar, taoiseach (president) of Ireland, is the son of an Indian and an Irish woman; Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, where he was born, is from a Pakistani family. Perhaps the most striking case is that of Humza Yousaf, chief minister of Scotland. Because the others belong to parties that are not especially nationalist: Sunak, to the Conservatives; Varadkar, to Fine Gael, Christian Democrat; Sadiq to Labor. But Yousaf, a Muslim born in Glasgow to Pakistani parents, leads the Scottish National Party, which aims to embody the essence of Scotland, that misty country of castles and bagpipes. Which did not prevent him from swearing in his office in Urdu (after doing so in English), wearing, of course, a kilt.
I was surprised that, apparently, no one commented anything on this matter – neither to celebrate it, nor to shout to the heavens – until I saw the article by a certain Janan Ganesh, in the Financial Times on January 5. That silence has also caught his attention. He attributes this to the famous British “empiricism”: the concrete matters, the data (that is why we do talk, for example, about immigration), not abstractions like “identities.”
Could be. To me, in any case, it seems like excellent news that any resident of a country can govern it, no matter where they come from. The opposite – what happened in Catalonia when some questioned the right of a native of Córdoba, José Montilla, to preside over the Generalitat – would be to assume that there are two classes of citizens, “us”, with all the rights, and “the others”, grudgingly tolerated. And that would be very similar to what those who emigrated to Europe from the Indian subcontinent had been fleeing from, I suppose: a caste system.
