When the Conservative Party decided to field Rishi Sunak from Richmond (Yorkshire) in the 2015 parliamentary elections in the UK, voters in the constituency had no idea who he was. Until then, his standout identity among his peers was that he was the son-in-law of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy, whose businesswoman daughter Akshata Murthy was married to him. Of course, he was blessed with degrees from prestigious institutions, such as Oxford, Stanford and Winchester College, but he had no political background. He was born in 1980 in Southampton to working parents - his father was a doctor and mother a chemist. Both were Indian-origin and came from East Africa. Sunak himself was a proud and practising Hindu.

But such a background hardly guarantees success in an election. So, did the Conservative Party gamble on an unknown 34-year-old with a "college kid" look, who until a year earlier had a flourishing career in investment banking in the US? Not at all, because the party had assigned Sunak its safest seat in the country. The party bosses must have seen something in him that prompted them to parachute him into a safe Tory haven. The initial reaction of Tory voters was that he "was not a local lad". But........

© NDTV