Tulip, Rushanara and Rupa do it again

Tulip Siddiq, Rushanara Ali and Rupa Haq, three Bangladesh-origin Labour Party candidates, have retained their memberships in the British parliament, winning from their constituencies. It was well anticipated the trio would make it happen. Tulip and Rupa have been reelected for the second time, while it was a third victory for Rushanara in the parliamentary polls race. Tulip Siddiq, the granddaughter of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, retained her Hampstead and Kilburn seat with a 26.6% majority in the 2017 polls. She bagged 34,464 votes against her Conservative rival Claire-Louise Leyland’s 18,904. Compared to the 2015 polls, Tulip got 14.6% more votes in Thursday’s election. She won by a wide margin of around 15,000 votes, while the figure in the previous polls stood at 1,138. Born in Mitcham, London in 1982, Tulip pursued two Master’s degrees – one in English literature and another in politics, policy and government – both from King’s College London. After the 2015 polls, Tulip had been inducted into the shadow cabinet of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and had joined Shadow Minister of Education Angela Rayner’s team of four as the Shadow Minister of Early Years education. She, however, resigned from the post after taking a strong stance against the Brexit bill early this year. “Humbled to be re-elected for my home seat of Hampstead and Kilburn! … Thank you all so much for your kind support,” Tulip tweeted after the massive triumph. Rushanara Ali has won from Bethnal Green and Bow with 42,969 votes. Her rival Conservative Party candidate Charlotte Chirico got 7,576 votes. The figures show her dominant win by over 35,000 votes. The turnout for Bethnal Green and Bow was 69.84%. “Thank you Bethnal Green & Bow from the bottom of my heart for re-electing me as your Member of Parliament. It is an honour and a privilege,” she wrote on Twitter. Hailing from Biswanath in Sylhet, Rushanara was the first Bangladesh-born MP in the House of Commons, who was elected in 2010 for the first time. She managed to retain the parliament membership in the 2015 elections, after which she was made the UK Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy for Bangladesh. Rushanara served as the shadow minister of International Development and Education. Meanwhile, Rupa Haq has been re-elected as an MP for the Ealing Central & Acton seat bagging 13,807 more votes than her Conservative rival Joy Morrissey. A total of 33,037 votes were cast for her, who came successful in the last polls by a narrow margin of 274 votes. Rupa, following the previous polls, was inducted into the Labour Party shadow cabinet as the home affairs minister. Rupa, a senior lecturer of sociology at Kingston University, hails from Pabna. In 2015, 11 politicians with Bangladesh-origin contested in the general election, when the trio registered a landslide win from respective constituencies. But, this time around, the number of the candidates with Bangladesh-origin jumped to 14, of whom eight contested with Labour Party tickets, with one running the polls race as a Liberal Democrat hopeful, one as a Friends Party nominee and four others as independent aspirants.