Roving Periscope: British PM Sunak sacks controversial Home Secretary Braverman
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Indian-origin British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday sacked his controversial Home Secretary Suella Braverman, also of Indian origin, after she criticized the pro-Palestinian marches in an article she published in a newspaper without her boss’s consent.
More than a year after becoming the British PM, Sunak started a Cabinet reshuffle on Monday morning by first sacking Braverman, 43, after days of speculation over her job since it emerged a controversial newspaper article attacking the London Metropolitan Police was published without clearance from her boss, the media reported, quoting sources from Downing Street.
Braverman, the Goan-origin woman, repeatedly courted controversies, most recently by accusing the Met Police of playing favorites when tackling aggressive anti-Israel protests, in an article she published in The Times.
Sunak was under pressure from sections of his Conservative Party as well as faced attacks from the Opposition for allowing her to continue in her job after she went ahead with the article in a perceived breach of the ministerial code.
“Our brave police officers deserve the thanks of every decent citizen for their professionalism in the face of violence and aggression from protesters and counter-protesters in London yesterday. That multiple officers were injured doing their duty is an outrage,” Braverman said in a statement on Sunday evening following far-right violence during the protests over the weekend.
“The sick, inflammatory, and, in some cases, clearly criminal chants, placards, and paraphernalia openly on display at the march mark a new low. Antisemitism and other forms of racism together with the valorizing of terrorism on such a scale is deeply troubling,” she said.
This was not the only controversy she triggered.
Days before comparing pro-Palestinian protests with scenes witnessed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, she had caused outrage by claiming that those sleeping on streets are only doing so because it is a “lifestyle choice” they have made.
In September, Braverman claimed that people seeing asylum in the United Kingdom pretend to be gay “in many instances” to get “special treatment” and stay in the country.
In April, she said in a TV interview that groups of men, almost all British Pakistanis, are part of grooming gangs that “pursue, drug, rape, and harm vulnerable English girls.”
Another controversy erupted when Braverman called the arrival of asylum seekers in small boats from across the English Channel “the invasion on our southern coast.” She was slammed for her choice of language and migrants said the rhetoric “puts so many people at risk.”
In October 2022, as then PM Liz Truss’ Home Secretary, she spoke about her “dream” to see a plane of asylum seekers take off for Rwanda before Christmas.
