I have just found in the Financial Times the answer, or a possible answer, to something I have been wondering 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 in the Indian subcontinent?
Let's see: Rishi Sunak was born in Southampton, where his Indian parents 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 particularly nationalist: Sunak, in the Conservative Party; Varadkar, in Fine Gael, Christian Democrat; Sadiq to Labor. But Yousaf, a Muslim born in Glasgow to Pakistani parents, leads the Scottish National Party, the party that aims to embody the essence of Scotland, that funny country of castles, whiskey and bagpipes. Nothing prevented him from taking the oath of office in Urdu (after doing so in English), wearing, of course, a kilt.
I was surprised that, apparently, no one commented on this matter - neither to celebrate it, nor to raise the cry to heaven - until I saw the article by one Janan Ganesh, in the Financial Times on the 5 of January This silence has caught his attention too. He attributes this to the famous British "empiricism": what matters is the concrete, the data (which is why we talk, for example, about immigration), not abstractions like "identities".
Maybe yes. 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 – which happened in Catalonia when some questioned the right of a native of Córdoba, José Montilla, to preside over the Generalitat – would be to take for granted that there are two classes of citizens, "us", with all the rights, and "the others", reluctantly tolerated. And that would be very similar to what those from the Indian subcontinent who migrated to Europe were fleeing, I suppose: a caste system.
