Bangladeshi origin Rushanara Ali has been elected as the Member of Parliament from Bethnal Green and Bow constituency in the United Kingdom General Election 2015.
She secured 32,387 votes while her nearest candidate Matthew Smith of Conservative got 8,070 votes, reports BBC online in its live coverage of the election.
Rushanara was elected as the first female Muslim MPs under the Labour Party with a majority of 11,574 votes in 2010.
She is the first person of Bangladeshi origin to have been elected to the House of Commons and, along with Shabana Mahmood and Yasmin Qureshi, became one of the United Kingdom’s first female Muslim MPs.
Four years later, Rushnara resigned from the Labour front bench so that she did not get forced to vote in favour of a motion permitting military action in Iraq.
Rushanara Ali immigrated to the East End of London at the age of seven with her family. She attended the Mulberry School for Girls and Tower Hamlets College. She grew up in Tower Hamlets and studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St John’s College, Oxford.
