Historical facts
Apropos to your front-page report on May 7 'First Bangalee to become British lawmaker.' Allow me to register my point. As a Bengali , although across the border in West Bengal, while I am proud of Rushanara Ali's election to the House of Commons, let me set a few historical facts right.
As far back as 1919, Sir Satyendra Prasanno Sinha was raised to the House of Lords as Baron Sinha of Raipur. The gates of his crumbling mansion on Calcutta's Lord Sinha Road still has the coat of arms on it. It was a hereditary peerage, and so his descendant Arup Kumar Sinha has inherited the title and is, as I write, the 6th Baron in the line.
More recently in 2004, Prof. Kumar Bhattacharya was nominated as a life peer to the House of Lords. Baron Bhattacharyya of course has the right to sit in the house, unlike Sinha, who like all hereditary peers were debarred from the House of Lords by Tony Blair's reforms.
But to Rushanara goes the credit of fighting her way through the ranks and entering with a popular mandate. My felicitations to her.
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