Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy said he was proud of his son-in-law Rishi Sunak who is set to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Sunak will be the UK's first Prime Minister of Indian origin, a Hindu, and a person of colour.
Sunak, 42, on Sunday won the race to lead the Conservative Party and is now set to become Britain's first prime minister of Indian origin.
"Congratulations to Rishi. We are proud of him and we wish him success," Murthy said in first first reaction emailed to PTI. "We are confident he will do his best for the people of the United Kingdom." The son of a pharmacist mother and doctor father, Sunak was educated at one of England's most renowned schools, Winchester, and then Oxford. He spent three years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and later gained an MBA from Stanford in California, where he met his wife Akshata Murthy, daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy.
He married Akshata in 2009 and the couple has two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka.
Sunak’s victory in the Tory leadership race came at the end of a dramatic few days in Westminster since Truss resigned last Thursday in the wake of a disastrous tax-cutting mini-budget and several policy U-turns. Former prime minister Boris Johnson ruling himself out from the contest over the weekend and Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt conceding defeat just moments before the shortlisting deadline on Monday paved the way for a remarkable political comeback for Sunak – having lost the Tory membership vote to Truss just last month.
However, his popularity as the frontrunner among his party colleagues has been replicated yet again as more than half the Tory MPs came out publicly in his support. He now faces the enormous challenge of steering the UK economy through massive inflationary turbulence and also uniting the different wings of a divided Conservative Party.