New Delhi: There were 158 British Asians (i.e., Britons of South Asian descent) standing for election: 111 men and 47 women. The Conservatives are standing 36 British Asian candidates, Labour 34, the Liberal Democrats 32, UKIP 21, the Greens eight, the Communities United Party four, the SNP one, and assorted other parties 17. Five British Asians are standing as independents. British Indians are the largest non-white ethnic grouping in Britain, and the votes of the British Indian community are seen as critical.
The 2015 election will feature the first Sikh candidate to stand in a Northern Ireland constituency: Amandeep Singh Bhogal, a Conservative standing in Upper Bann.
After a nervy night for the Labour party which suffered shock defeat in many constituencies and lost the election overall, three women from Bangladesh became members of “mother of all parliamentsâ€.
Three Bangladeshi-origin Labour Party candidates Rushnara Ali, Tulip Rizwana Siddiq and Dr. Rupa Huq have won their respective seats in the UK parliamentary elections on Thursday.
Rushnara Ali recorded a landslide victory in the Bethnal Green and Bow seat for the second consecutive time while Tulip Rizwana Siddiq won the Hampstead and Kilburn seat and Rupa Haq has won the Ealing Central and Acton Parliamentary seat.
A total of 11 Bangladeshi-origin candidates have participated in the polls. Among them three female candidates won.
Conservative Party candidate Rishi Sunak, son-in-law of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, became a first-time MP on Friday in the UK Election 2015, which saw 10 Indian-origin candidates elected into the House of Commons.
Sunak was contesting from the Conservative safe seat of Richmond constituency in North Yorkshire, which was the constituency of former Foreign Minister William Hague, who had held the Richmond seat till he stepped down last July.
A graduate from Winchester College, Oxford University and Stanford University, Sunak, who is married to Murthy’s daughter Akshata, had said that he will boost small and medium local businesses if he was elected.
Sunak had co-founded a 1-billion pound global investment firm and then invested in a number of small businesses in the UK.
All the sitting MPs of Indian-origin, barring one, were re-elected, keeping the figure at 10, same as in the last elections.
There were more than 50 candidates of Indian origin in the fray for the UK polls on Thursday.
The PIOs who won the seats included Labour Party’s Keith Vaz (Leicester East), an MP since1987, as well as his sister Valerie Vaz (Walsall South).
The others who won are Virendra Sharma (Ealing Southall); Seema Malhotra (Feltham & Heston); Lisa Nandy (Wigan), who is half Indian-half English; Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove), who is half Indian-half Pakistani; Priti Patel (Witham), Alok Sharma (Reading West); and Shailesh Vara (Cambridgeshire North West), an MP since 2005.
“I am absolutely delighted. I have served them for 27 years and they have given me the huge privilege of an extension of another five,” Keith Vaz said.
Former Indian-origin MP in the last house, Conservative Party’s Paul Uppal, lost in Wolverhampton South West in the West Midlands of England.
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(With inputs from Mohiuddin Kader)