Burnham picks three new PIO MPs from 2024 intake to join front bench; Malhotra and Gill return to backbenches
TOI correspondent from London: Three Indian-origin young Labour MPs elected at the July 2024 general election have been given front bench roles in UK PM Andy Burnham’s new govt.Kanishka Narayan (36), a Hindu, joins the Cabinet in the newly-created role of AI minister, whilst two female Sikh MPs , Satvir Kaur (41) and Harpreet Uppal (43), have been awarded front bench roles.There are now two Hindus and two Sikhs on the front bench as Uma Kumaran, a Hindu of Sri Lankan heritage, has been made a junior minister in the foreign office.Meanwhile two high-profile PIO MPs, Seema Malhotra, who had been Indo-Pacific minister, and Preet Kaur Gill, who was junior health minister, both aged 53 with ancestral roots in Jalandhar, Punjab, have both left govt and returned to the backbenches following Burnham’s reshuffle.Both were close to former UK MP Keir Starmer. When calls started for Starmer to resign following the disastrous Labour local election results in May, Gill publicly backed him and urged colleagues to do so as well. Malhotra made similar public statements backing Starmer.Lisa Nandy (46), who is half Indian, whose father Dipak was born in Kolkata, will continue as culture secretary and sit in Cabinet. She had plenty going in her favour with Burnham as she was born in Manchester, where Burnam was mayor for nine years and where he has set up No. 10 North. She stood as a rival to Starmer in Labour’s 2020 leadership contest and Wigan, her constituency just 27km from Manchester, Burnham’s favourite place and from where his political philosophy, “Manchesterism”, derives.Uppal also had an advantage. She had worked with Burnham on his 2017 Greater Manchester mayoral election campaign and represents Huddersfield, which is just 40 km from Manchester. She has been made assistant whip.High-flier Narayan was born in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, and moved to Wales aged 12. He studied at Eton, Oxford, and Stanford, and was previously a junior minister.Southampton Test MP Kaur, whose parents hail from Punjab and ran a sari shop in Southampton, has been appointed as minister for safeguarding, violence against women and girls, and equalities.
