In February 2020, when the now disgraced prime minister Boris Johnson appointed Rishi Sunak, the British-born third-generation son of Indian immigrants, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most important of the great offices of state, the news was greeted with gleeful astonishment and a sense of arrival - in India, not in Britain.
Articles and columns like this one - it was also tweeted approvingly by RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy - made much of Sunak’s Indian origins. It also proclaimed to its largely Hindu audience that Sunak, described as a self-proclaimed “proud Hindu”, took his oath of allegiance as an MP on the Gita, apparently “despite protests from a section of Britishers [sic]”. Not only was there no protest, the official record of the swearing-in of new members shows the full range of diverse options available to members to take their oaths, from choice of holy book, to the language in which to take the oath. And so some members chose to solemnly affirm rather than swear, some chose the Quran, and some chose to take the oath in Welsh or Urdu, in addition to the mandatory English.
