The most powerful woman of Indian origin in the world tilted further into cartoonish villanousness this week, during the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. At every given opportunity, Suella Fernandes Braverman – her father is Goan from Assagao and Nairobi, and her mother is Mauritian Tamil served up more extremist talking points to the reactionary Tory base, in what is turning out to be her permanent campaign to become prime minister. Make no mistake: it was highly effective, and there’s an excellent chance she will now get there. In the thoroughly rigged current UK scenario, the only votes that count belong to roughly 150,000 mostly elderly party members (less than that number voted the last time around) and she said exactly what they wanted to hear.
“True Blue Braverman” is what The Telegraph called the UK Home Secretary – one of the four “great offices of state” that run the country – “a new heroine of the Tory grassroots.” That may be true, but many others were repulsed by the casual cruelty served up with a smile by this ambitious 42-year-old: “I would love to have (front page headlines) with a plane taking off to Rwanda (containing unwillingly deported asylum-seekers), that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”
The radio host James O’Brien voiced that other consensus, "It seems to me very strange that Conservative politicians who wear their Christianity most prominently on their sleeves, the ones who actually talk about it, are the ones who often seem to engage in the most callous and disgusting of conduct. They used to be on the fringes, they used to be beyond the boundaries of acceptability. Imagine dreaming of desperate people being deported against their will to a country they might never have heard of before. Dreaming of that and living in a country, or rather living in a bubble where relishing that prospect is not just acceptable but even perhaps admirable. What is wrong with this woman? How can anybody have ended up this curdled and cruel?"
In fact, there’s no great mystery, and O’Brien perfectly accurately diagnosed the situation himself: it’s the “consequence of treating people like Nigel Farage as if they had anything valid or decent to contribute. That weaponisation of refugees and asylum seekers and immigrants in general has polluted every corner of this country.” Over the past two decades, arrant xenophobia has become the new UK religion (of course the phenomenon is not restricted to that country) and the path to power requires playing that card. Here, again, our Suella distinguishes herself for both theatricality and ruthlessness, by opposing her own prime minister’s trade agreement with India, which includes limited increases in visas: “I do have some reservations. Look at migration in this country – the largest group of people who overstay are Indian migrants. We even reached an agreement with the Indian government last year to encourage and facilitate better co-operation. It has not necessarily worked very well.”
Of course all this is tailored to underline her suitability to paleo-conservatives, but Braverman’s political genius – and capacity to say literally anything to get ahead – really emerged in an extraordinary interview that has since gone viral, where she directly addressed ethnicity. “Your parents are from Mauritius and Kenya. How do you feel about stopping people from coming here,” asks an obviously complicit interlocutor. Braverman, dismissively, “I have no qualms about that, absolutely. This is a common argument trotted out about by the left, that because of the colour of my skin, and my heritage, I have to think a certain way, and I can’t declare certain truths on migration.”
The interviewer blithers about annoying the left, which brings a smile to Braverman’s face: “I hope I’ve annoyed them. That would be my delight. But no, my parents came here through safe and legal routes. My mother was recruited by the NHS, and my Dad came here because he was effectively kicked out of Kenya, but they came here legitimately (and) that was the policy of the government. They came here, they integrated, they loved this country from afar as children of Empire. They don’t, by the way, have any qualms about extolling the virtues of the British Empire. It was the British Empire that brought infrastructure, the legal system, the civil service, the military to countries like Mauritius and Kenya, and my parents are so proud. I’m not going to apologise for our past history.” Another interjection – “should we be proud (instead)”? – and she shrugs her shoulders. “Yes, I am proud of the British Empire. Yes.”
How did we get to this pinnacle of ugliness and absurdity, and is there any way to recover? Here, I really liked what Rana Dasgupta wrote on Facebook, where the acclaimed British Indian author – he has won the Commonwealth Prize and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, and his Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi is one of the great books of our times – asked the simple question: “Should we give up the national ‘we’?” He pointed out that in wider British society, people routinely try to shut down debate about empire in similar terms. "Don't make me feel ashamed of our history," they say. "I'm proud of what we did." But maybe the problem is this "we". Are "we" so implausibly personal that people act like wounded narcissists when they hear criticism of a little set of long-dead individuals to whom they have no connection?”
Dasgupta asks, “What right does any living person have to feel either "proud" or "ashamed" of the British empire? What right do they have to "apologise"? Are today's empire nostalgists capable of a fraction of the cruelty or originality of 18th-century imperial pioneers? Could they have sailed on 18th-century ships, could they have watched their companions dying of malaria, could they have shipped slaves, fought the French in Canada and India? Could they have designed anything remotely as mind-bending as the imperial plantation economy? Of course not. They are conservatives in the proper sense of the world: they are paranoically attached to existing political structures, social hierarchies and revenue possibilities. They have nothing in common with the truly radical figures of Britain's 18th century, and can claim no ownership of their exploits in any way - whether through ‘pride’ or ‘shame’.”
In this way, he says, “the national "we" unleashes fantasmatic identifications between, say, Suella Braverman and a weird selection of the dead: merchants, warriors, kings, intellectuals and writers, most of whom despised her race and gender. It is a fiction as preposterous as "in my previous life I was Cleopatra". If this "we" is fantastically extensible in temporal terms, however, it has almost no spatial flexibility. Very few British people would know how to feel "proud" of Chinese economic growth, very few are "ashamed" of Myanmar's destruction of its Rohingya population, few feel the need to "apologise" to the countless Ethiopian farmers forcibly removed from their land over the last decades, and turned into refugees. But those are much more interesting feelings. It is true that, at certain moments in history, the national "we" takes on revolutionary significance. Then it becomes forward-looking, poetic, strategically vital. But in more settled eras, it turns the mind in tired, repetitive circles. At such times it serves no purpose. Something more productive should be put in its place.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)