By Sonia Sarkar
(ANALYSIS) The Labour Party in the U.K. made a clean sweep on July 4 by winning 412 seats, while the incumbent Conservative Party was decimated to 121 seats. But Labour wasn’t the choice of the country’s rising number of Hindu nationalists as they have been rallying behind the latter.
A section of British Hindus, who have been boastful cheerleaders of India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, campaigned for “one of their own” — the incumbent British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a man of Indian descent and Hindu ethnic origin.
Sunak, who retains Richmond and Northallerton seat, has also flaunted his Hindu-ness in many ways, from time to time — by wearing a red sacred thread around his wrist and swearing oath to parliament upon the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. Ahead of the general elections, Sunak visited a Hindu temple in London pledging to build a “strategic partnership with India.”
When Sunak was appointed the prime minister in 2022, Hindu nationalists in India and the U.K. saw his appointment as a validation of BJP’s sectarian Hindutva agenda to establish Hindu nationalist ideology.
Besides Sunak, Conservative members of Parliament — Bob Blackman, who has been reelected from Harrow East in Greater London, and Priti Patel, who retained the Witham seat in Essex — also enjoy huge support of the Hindu nationalists.
This story was originally published in religionunplugged.com. Read the full story here.
