- Wednesday, April 30, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Ever since she remarked in an interview recently that Indians are the largest group that overstays its visa in the UK and expressed reservations over the free trade agreement that India and the UK are looking to finalise soon, British home secretary Suella Braverman has come under the scanner of observers in India.
The fact that the 42-year-old is an individual of Indian origin has made the scanners even more sharp.
India’s ThePrint newspaper on Sunday (9) came up with an article about Braverman titled ‘Suella Braverman — UK Conservative home secretary with a love of Empire & disdain for migrants’ in which another conversation of her was highlighted.
Speaking to The Telegraph’s Christopher Hope, Braverman said she is proud of the British Empire and she was not one who would apologise for the past history.
?️ “I hope I annoy them, that would be my delight, if I’m annoying the Left”@SuellaBraverman joined @christopherhope for a live @ChoppersPodcast at the Conservative Party conference today.
See more here:https://t.co/VEyZhCO6p5 pic.twitter.com/SAxz1FbjD7
— Telegraph Politics (@TelePolitics) October 4, 2022
Batting for the Empire, she said that it was the Empire that had brought “infrastructure, legal system, civil service and military to countries like Kenya and Mauritius”.
Both the home secretary’s parents — mother Uma Fernandes and father Christie Fernandes — have Indian origins and shifted to the UK in the 1960s. While Christie went to Kenya first from Goa in India, Uma — of Tamil descent — went from Mauritius. She worked as a nurse in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) for nearly five decades.
When Hope asked how she felt about stopping other migrants coming to the UK when her own parents came from countries such as Kenya and Mauritius, Braverman said, “I have no qualms about that… and I and again.. and this is, uh, a kind of a common argument trotted out by the Left that, you know, because of the colour of my skin and heritage I have to think a certain way and I can’t declare certain truths on migration.”
She said her parents reached the UK through safe and legal routes and they integrated into the country and loved it.
ThePrint article said while Braverman’s remarks on the Empire and immigration were not new, they made evident her ideological moorings — “her love of Empire and disdain for migrants”.
It also said earlier this year, Braverman told the Conservative Home, a website devoted to the Tory party that her parents arrived in the UK with a huge fondness for the British Empire.
In June, she said that the Empire should be celebrated, even if the “Left” was ashamed.
The Indian piece said, “The home secretary has been criticised for overseeing an incredibly slow immigration programme for refugees fleeing Ukraine. She has been a supporter of the controversial Rwanda asylum plan, which will send those applying for asylum in the UK to Rwanda instead.
“While the UN and think-tanks have urged the UK to stop the programme, the home secretary has rather insensitively said that watching a flight take asylum seekers to Rwanda was her “dream” and “obsession”.
“In another remark against immigration, Braverman stated that the UK has “too many low-skilled migrant workers and very high numbers of international students”.
“However, Braverman’s rose-tinted views of the Empire gloss over its atrocities —the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, for which the UK has still not apologised, the Bengal famine of 1943, the travails of indentured labour in Mauritius, and the atrocities during the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya — which are among a slew of wrongdoings committed across the world.”
