As the Labour party swept the U.K. general elections, the number of Indian-origin Members of Parliament increased from 15 in the previous Conservative government to 26 — the highest number of British-Indian members.

Overall, 107 British-Indians contested the elections. Here are some prominent candidates and how they fared in the elections.

Also read: U.K. General Election 2024 highlights: Landslide win for Labour; Keir Starmer appointed new PM

Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak, the outgoing Prime Minister of U.K., is arguably the most renowned Indian-origin political leader in the country in the current political arena. He contested the 2024 election from the Richmond and Northallerton constituency in northern England. 

Mr. Sunak was also the first Indian-origin Prime Minister of the U.K. He was born in 1980 in Southampton on England’s south coast to parents of Indian descent who were both born in East Africa.

His wife Akshata Murthy is an Indian citizen and is the daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayan Murthy. 

Among his most controversial plans was his anti-migration stance. Earlier this year, he had vowed to begin forcibly removing migrants with failed asylum claims to Rwanda starting in July in a bid to deter migrants from crossing the English Channel on boats to enter the U.K. 

Shivani Raja

Shivani Raja is the British-Indian Conservative winner from Leicester East. She is a first-generation British citizen and was born to parents who came to Leicester from Kenya and India in the late 1970s. Her policies are in line with those of Mr. Sunak’s and the larger Conservative Party, including tougher immigration controls. 

Rajesh Agrawal

Labour Party’s Rajesh Agrawal lost to Conservative candidate Shivani Raja in Leicester East. Mr. Agrawal was born in Madhya Pradesh and grew up in India, and is the former Deputy Mayor of London for Business.

Mr. Agrawal campaigned on the issues of unemployment and low wages in light of the rising cost of living. Leicester is home to many British Indians and immigrants

Kanishka Narayan

Kanishka Narayan of Labour Party won the Vale of Glamorgan constituency in Wales. He was born in Bihar, India, and moved to Cardiff with his parents at 12. He studied at Oxford and Stanford universities, and has previously worked in public policy. 

Suella Braverman

Suella Braverman was the former Home Secretary to Rishi Sunak before she was fired for defying her boss in November 2023. She was born to Indian-origin parents who emigrated to the U.K. from Africa in the 1960s. In the 2024 election, she won the Fareham and Waterlooville constituency.

Ms. Braverman has been active in the Conservative party from her days as an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge. She campaigned for the country to leave the EU during the Brexit referendum. Despite being from a family of immigrants, she is known for her hardline views against immigration, and has previously vowed to reduce the annual inflow into the U.K. to “tens of thousands”. 

Abbas Merali

Abbas Merali was a candidate from Harrow West in the U.K. parliamentary election, representing the Conservative and Unionist Party. He was defeated by Labour Party candidate Gareth Thomas. 

Navendu Mishra

Navendu Mishra, Labour Party candidate from Stockport constituency, won the 2024 U.K. parliamentary election and held on to his seat. His parents are from Uttar Pradesh.

Prior to entering politics, Mr. Mishra was a shop-floor trade unionist in Stockport, before becoming an organiser for Unison and helping to organise care workers in precarious employment.

Preet Kaur Gill

Preet Kaur Gill won the Birmingham Edgbaston constituency as a Labour Party candidate in the 2024 U.K. general election. She became U.K.’s first female Sikh MP in 2017. She was born to parents of Indian-origin in the U.K., and was the Shadow Minister for Primary Care and Public Health before the election. 

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, popularly called Tan Dhesi, is a U.K. politician of Indian origin who has been elected as the winner in Slough constituency. He is a Labour Party member.

Mr. Dhesi was born in Berkshire, but completed most of his primary education in Punjab, India, before returning to the U.K. at 9. In the Parliament, he was the Shadow Minister for Exports. 

Lisa Nandy

Lisa Nandy of the Labour party held on to her Wigan seat in the election — the constituency she has represented since 2010. She’s the daughter of well-known academic of Indian origin, Dipak Nandy.

In the past, she was the Labour Councillor on the Hammersmith and Fulham London Borough Council, and has also worked as the Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities. 

Seema Malhotra

Seema Malhotra, the Labour and Co-operative Party candidate in Feltham and Heston constituency, won the 2024 U.K. election.

Before becoming a full-time politician, Ms. Malhotra worked as a management consultant. 

Valerie Vaz

Labour party candidate Valerie Vaz won the reformed Walsall and Bloxwich constituency. She was first elected in 2010 from the Walsall South constituency, which now stands abolished.

Her younger brother Keith Vaz is also a Labour leader in the U.K. and was the longest-serving Indian-origin MP in the House of Commons when he retired in 2019 after 32 years. 

Baggy Shanker

Labour candidate Baggy Shanker won the Derby south constituency in the 2024 U.K. election. He has been a trade unionist working in the manufacturing and civil aerospace sectors for over three decades. 

Uday Nagaraj

Labour candidate Uday Nagaraju lost the North Bedfordshire constituency to Conservative and Unionist Party leader Richard Fuller by a margin of over 5,000 votes.

Mr. Nagaraju studied engineering the Nagpur University before moving to the U.K. He founded the AI Policy Labs in 2020 before venturing into politics. 

Hajira Piranie

Hajira Piranie lost the Harborough, Oadby and Wigston seat to Conservative candidate Neil O’Brien by a narrow margin of only around 2,000 votes. Her mother is from Maharashtra and her paternal grandparents are from Gujarat. 

Shama Tatler  

Shama Tatler, Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, lost to Conservative candidate Iain Duncan Smith by a little under 5,000 votes. 

Ms. Tatler is a second-generation British Indian with parents who were born in Nairobi and Mombasa. She has been a Councillor for Fryent Ward. 

Ryan Jude

Labour candidate Ryan Jude lost in Tatton constituency to the Conservative candidate by only around 1,100 votes. His parents had moved to the U.K. from India to work for the NHS. He works in environmental and climate policy.

Primesh Patel

Primesh Patel, Labour party candidate in Harrow East, lost to Conservative candidate in the constituency. He started his career in health and social care sector with NHS and worked there for 18 years. 

Britain’s first woman finance minister Rachel Reeves.
| Photo Credit: AP

Rachel Reeves, Britain’s first woman finance minister, is a former child chess champion and Bank of England economist who has pledged to grow the nation’s economy while showing strong fiscal discipline.

Reeves, 45, becomes chancellor of the exchequer after her centre-left Labour party won Thursday’s U.K. general election by a landslide, ending 14 years of rule by the right-wing Conservatives.

Also Read :Landslide win for Labour; Keir Starmer appointed new PM

“It is the honour of my life to have been appointed chancellor of the exchequer,” Ms. Reeves wrote on social media platform X after her appointment by new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

“To every young girl and woman reading this, let today show that there should be no limits on your ambitions.”

Labour had put the economy at the heart of its election manifesto, targeting growth and wealth creation as key priorities in government, while its emphasis on the latter is not normally associated with the party’s traditionally leftist policies.

“Economic growth was the Labour Party’s mission,” Ms. Reeves added on Friday.

“It is now a national mission. Let’s get to work,” said the married mother of two children.

‘Iron chancellor’

Ms. Reeves recently told company bosses that Labour had become “the natural party of British business”, adding that the party would show “iron discipline” over public finances.

The comments drew comparisons with ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister.

Unlike Conservative leader Thatcher, who privatised key sectors after becoming prime minister in 1979, Ms. Reeves wants a form of renationalisation, notably for energy, as she takes inspiration from policy enacted by US President Joe Biden.

Labour has pledged to create Great British Energy, a publicly owned company that would spearhead funding, alongside the private sector, for the “green” transition away from fossil fuels.

James Wood, senior teaching associate in political economy at the University of Cambridge, said Labour and Reeves were seeking a “responsible” approach to the public purse.

“When she talks about being an iron chancellor, I think what she means is: we’re going to balance the books and we’re going to be responsible — and we’re going to try and get Britain’s economy running… in a responsible way,” he told AFP.

London-born Ms. Reeves tapped into public anger over Mr. Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss, whose unfunded 2022 mini-budget crashed the pound and sent mortgage rates soaring, worsening a cost-of-living crisis.

“They want to distance themselves from fiscal irresponsibility, not making big promises about spending that they can’t possibly keep,” Wood added.

Banking career

Ms. Reeves, whose parents were teachers, is no stranger to outmanoeuvring opponents.

She became British girls’ chess champion aged 14 before studying philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, which was followed by a Master’s degree at the London School of Economics.

After graduating, she worked as an economist for a decade, first at the Bank of England before switching to the private sector.

While working for British retail bank HBOS, the global financial crisis struck in 2008, resulting in her employer receiving a huge bailout, along with other lenders, from Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

In 2010, when the Conservatives entered power in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Reeves was elected Labour MP for Leeds West in northern England.

Eleven years later, Starmer appointed her as Labour’s finance spokesperson. Her sister Ellie Reeves is also a Labour MP.

Britain’s Labour Party swept to power on July 5 after more than a decade in opposition, as a jaded electorate handed the party a landslide victory — but also a mammoth task of reinvigorating a stagnant economy and dispirited nation.

Labour leader Keir Starmer will officially become prime minister later in the day, leading his party back to government less than five years after it suffered its worst defeat in almost a century.

U.K. General Election 2024 LIVE updates

In the merciless choreography of British politics, he will take charge in 10 Downing St. shortly after Conservative leader Rishi Sunak and his family left the official residence and King Charles III accepted his resignation at Buckingham Palace.

“This is a difficult day, but I leave this job honored to have been prime minister of the best country in the world,” Sunak said in his farewell address.

Mr. Sunak had conceded defeat earlier in the morning, saying the voters had delivered a “sobering verdict.”

In a magnanimous farewell speech in the same place where he had called for the snap election six weeks earlier, Sunak wished Starmer all the best but also acknowledged his missteps.

“I have heard your anger, your disappointment, and I take responsibility for this loss,” Sunak said. “To all the Conservative candidates and campaigners who worked tirelessly but without success, I’m sorry that we could not deliver what your efforts deserved.”

With almost all the results in, Labour had won 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons and the Conservatives 118.

“A mandate like this comes with a great responsibility,” Mr. Starmer acknowledged in a speech to supporters, saying the fight to regain people’s trust after years of disillusionment “is the battle that defines our age.”

Speaking as dawn broke in London, he said Labour would offer “the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day.”

For Mr. Starmer, it’s a massive triumph that will bring huge challenges, as he faces a weary electorate impatient for change against a gloomy backdrop of economic malaise, mounting distrust in institutions and a fraying social fabric.

“Nothing has gone well in the last 14 years,” said London voter James Erskine, who was optimistic for change in the hours before polls closed. “I just see this as the potential for a seismic shift, and that’s what I’m hoping for.”

And that’s what Mr. Starmer promised, saying “change begins now.”

Anand Menon, professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London, said British voters were about to see a marked change in political atmosphere from the tumultuous “politics as pantomime” of the last few years.

“I think we’re going to have to get used again to relatively stable government, with ministers staying in power for quite a long time, and with government being able to think beyond the very short term to medium-term objectives,” he said.

Britain has experienced a run of turbulent years — some of it of the Conservatives’ own making and some of it not — that has left many voters pessimistic about their country’s future. The U.K. divorce from the European Union followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine battered the economy, while lockdown-breaching parties held by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his staff caused widespread anger.

Rising poverty, crumbling infrastructure and overstretched National Health Service have led to gripes about “Broken Britain.”

Mr. Johnson’s successor, Liz Truss, rocked the economy further with a package of drastic tax cuts and lasted just 49 days in office. Truss, who lost her seat to Labour, was one of a slew of senior Tories kicked out in a stark electoral reckoning.

While the result appears to buck recent rightward electoral shifts in Europe, including in France and Italy, many of those same populist undercurrents flow in Britain. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage roiled the race with his party’s anti-immigrant “take our country back” sentiment and undercut support for the Conservatives and even grabbed some voters from Labour.

The result is a catastrophe for the Conservatives as voters punished them for 14 years of presiding over austerity, Brexit, a pandemic, political scandals and internecine conflict.

The historic defeat — the smallest number of seats in the party’s two-century history — leaves it depleted and in disarray and will spark an immediate contest to replace Sunak, who said he would step down as leader.

In a sign of the volatile public mood and anger at the system, the incoming Parliament will be more fractured and ideologically diverse than any for years. Smaller parties picked up millions of votes, including the centrist Liberal Democrats and Farage’s Reform UK. It won four seats, including one for Farage in the seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea, securing a place in Parliament on his eighth attempt.

The Liberal Democrats won about 70 seats, on a slightly lower share of the vote than Reform because its votes were more efficiently distributed. In Britain’s first-past-the-post system, the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins.

The Green Party won four seats, up from just one before the election.

One of the biggest losers was the Scottish National Party, which held most of Scotland’s 57 seats before the election but looked set to lose all but handful, mostly to Labour.

Labour did not set pulses racing with its pledges to get the sluggish economy growing, invest in infrastructure and make Britain a “clean energy superpower.”

But the party’s cautious, safety-first campaign delivered the desired result. The party won the support of large chunks of the business community and endorsements from traditionally conservative newspapers, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun tabloid, which praised Starmer for “dragging his party back to the center ground of British politics.”

The Conservative campaign, meanwhile, was plagued by gaffes. The campaign got off to an inauspicious start when rain drenched Sunak as he made the announcement outside 10 Downing St. Then, Sunak went home early from commemorations in France marking the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.

Several Conservatives close to Sunak are being investigated over suspicions they used inside information to place bets on the date of the election before it was announced.

In Henley-on-Thames, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of London, voters like Patricia Mulcahy, who is retired, sensed the nation was looking for something different. The community, which has long voted Conservative, flipped to the Liberal Democrats this time.

“The younger generation are far more interested in change,’’ Mulcahy said ahead of the results. “But whoever gets in, they’ve got a heck of a job ahead of them. It’s not going to be easy.”

On the eve of polls opening in the UK general election, Keir Starmer allowed himself a moment to reflect on how far he had come since he became leader of the Labour Party four-and-a-half years ago. Back then, the party was reeling from one of the worst defeats in its 100-year history.

“The optimists said it will take 10 years to fix this party and get it back,” he told reporters ahead of a final rally in the East Midlands. “The pessimists said you’re never going to fix this party, it’s never going to be in government again.” adding “Here we are.”

He has now led the Labour Party to victory, on track for the biggest majority in Parliament since at least Tony Blair’s New Labour landslide in 1997.

The UK’s presumptive prime minister has far outperformed the expectations of his chances when he took over from the hard-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2020. Bland, boring, “no Tony Blair,” as focus groups often describe him, this relative newcomer to the world of politics has, in part, been a beneficiary of circumstances.

Boris Johnson’s “partygate” scandal and Liz Truss’s “mini-budget” – which tanked the pound – came at the tail-end of years of Conservative austerity that left deep cuts to many public services. All have contributed to the result we have now seen in the British general election. But Starmer has had his part to play too, demonstrating a quiet ruthlessness in changing his party, purging the Corbynites, even expelling Corbyn himself, and bringing it into a position to win and govern again.

“It feels good, I have to be honest,” Starmer told Labour supporters in London after the party crossed the crucial 326-seat threshold in the House of Commons, adding that he knew “a mandate like this comes with a great responsibility.”

He’ll now have to show whether those same skills that got him into 10 Downing St. will help him resolve a staggering list of challenges. Britons are bruised by the impact of Brexit, the pandemic and a historic squeeze on living standards. His government faces a more dangerous world and has little money to spend on improving the situation at home without raising broad-based taxes, something he’s said he doesn’t want to do.

Despite being known as “Sir Keir” – he was knighted for his legal career before entering politics – the UK’s new prime minister had humble beginnings, something he has been at pains to remind voters throughout the election campaign. He grew up, as he often recounts, in a “pebble-dashed” semi-detached house in Oxted, a London commuter town in the Surrey countryside. He was one of four children to a toolmaker father and a mother with a debilitating autoimmune condition, which meant she had to give up her work as a nurse while Starmer was a child.

Starmer’s father raised his four children and looked after his sick wife on his own, and money was often tight. “I remember when our phone was cut off because we couldn’t pay the bill,” Starmer has recalled during the campaign. “How hard it was to make ends meet.”

The young Starmer was given a leg-up in life by attending Reigate Grammar, a state school, where he secured the grades to become the first in his family to attend university. He studied law at Leeds, graduating with honors, and got accepted to Oxford University to do a BCL – a prestigious year-long graduate law course. As a young man in London in the late 1980s, he lived in a “party flat” where there was sometimes vomit in the bathtub, hosting friends into the early hours and writing radical treatises for niche left-leaning publications. But by day he was climbing the ranks to become a respected human rights lawyer.

Starmer, who has denied being the inspiration for the dashing human rights lawyer Mark Darcy in the book and film Bridget Jones’ Diary, became known for his pro bono work, including defending individuals in the Caribbean against the death penalty. He had a brush with national fame for defending two activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, a gardener and a former postman, who sued for libel by McDonald’s for distributing leaflets criticizing the fast food chain, in what became known as the ‘McLibel’ case. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2002, a few months before his 40th birthday.

Keir Starmer as Director of Public Prosecutions, in 2010.

The following year, Starmer took on a role that would rewrite his theory of change: human rights adviser to the Policing Board in Northern Ireland. His job was to ensure that the new police service, formed after the 1998 peace agreement, commanded the trust of all communities. Before this role, Starmer had seen himself as railing against the system from the outside. This was his first experience of going inside an organization to deliver change. He found this new way was far more effective.

He took on a major role leading after that, becoming director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. The role put him in charge of delivering criminal justice in the UK, running a large organization of thousands of staff and lawyers during a period of major budget cuts. He led the organization when it successfully prosecuted senior media figures for phone hacking and politicians for fiddling with their expenses.

No one was surprised when the country’s former top prosecutor entered the world of politics. After his time as DPP ended, Starmer stood for election in the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St. Pancras in the May 2015 general election, expecting to be attorney general in Ed Miliband’s Cabinet. Instead, he went straight to the opposition benches and joined a Labour parliamentary party tearing itself apart after a shock defeat.

During the Jeremy Corbyn years Starmer, a remainer, rose through the shadow ministerial ranks to become shadow Brexit secretary. While colleagues like Rachel Reeves refused to serve under Corbyn or resigned from the party altogether over antisemitism, Starmer stayed. But by March 2018, Starmer and his allies – frustrated by the antisemitism problem and by Corbyn’s foreign policy stances – knew he would stand for party leader when the time came. For nearly two years, they held secret meetings every Monday morning to make sure he was ready for a leadership campaign when the time arose.

The time came in 2020. Starmer ran and won, a leadership campaign centered on 10 pledges to Labour members, essentially to retain the radical spirit of the Corbynite agenda with promises such as renationalizing, rail, mail, energy, and water. He memorably paid tribute to “my friend Jeremy Corbyn.”

Since taking over the leadership, Starmer has expelled Corbyn from the party, introduced mandatory antisemitism training, and vigorously vetted, and sometimes imposed, candidates who will be loyal to his leadership. Encouraged by his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and other close aides from the party’s right-wing, he has instilled a tight fiscal discipline, ditched almost all of his original leadership pledges, and draped his party in the union flag and embraced the language of security, discipline, and patriotism.

It has not all been plain sailing. He lost the Hartlepool by-election – seeing a safe Labour seat fall to Johnson’s Conservatives – early into his leadership in 2020, after which he considered resigning. The experience saw him fire some advisers, appoint new people, and hardened his determination to overhaul his party.

More recently, Starmer suffered a protracted and public disagreement among his top team over whether to ditch his party’s pledge to spend £28 billion ($36 billion) per year on green infrastructure, culminating in a major reversal. He has faced criticism and lost votes over an LBC radio interview in October in which he said Israel “has the right” to withhold power and water from Gaza, which he later apologized for.

The team of advisers around him has been referred to as a “boys’ club,” accused of heavy-handedness in their purging of the Corbynite wing of the party and in their wider attitude to the party’s elected representatives.

While his dissenters balk at how different he is from the man who stood for leader four and a half years ago, Starmer is proud of that difference. “I changed my party,” he says. “Now I want to change the country.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Britain’s opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria Starmer in London, Britain, July 5 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Britain’s main opposition Labour party looks set for a landslide election win, exit polls indicated, with Keir Starmer replacing Rishi Sunak as prime minister, ending 14 years of Conservative rule.

Also Read: U.K. General Election 2024 updates

The survey for U.K. broadcasters suggested centre-left Labour would win 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, putting it back in power for the first time since 2010, with a 170-seat majority.

Mr. Sunak’s Tories would only get 131 – a record low – with the right-wing vote apparently spliced by Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, which could bag 13 seats.

In another boost for the centrists, the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats would get 61 seats, ousting the Scottish National Party on 10 as the third biggest party.