Four out of the five women MPs are members of the Labour Party, including Shabana Mahmood, Valerie Vaz, Roshanara Ali and Yasmin Qureshi. Priti Patel is the sole Conservative. Three of the women are Muslims, the first Muslim women ever to be so elected. After the election results were announced, Oxford-educated Mahmood commented, 'The image of the voiceless Muslim woman who cannot leave the house is just not true: they are interested in politics. Parliament is for the people — all of the people — and the ethnic minority population should claim it.'

But there is still more to be registered in the record books. Valerie Vaz, a non-Muslim woman MP elected from Walsall, is the sister of fellow Labour MP Keith Vaz. The two of them represent the first time ever that a brother and sister have been elected to Westminster on the same party ticket.

Another political record has been created in the shape of Paul Uppal, the newly elected Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, which was once thought of as a whites-only constituency. For many years this was the constituency of the late Enoch Powell, who was associated with the racist ideology of English right-wingers that permeated the UK in the 1960s.

So for Wolverhampton South West to be won by Uppal, a clean-shaven Sikh of East African Asian ancestry, is an especially sweet victory.

Before the election there was widespread speculation that in the event of a Conservative victory there would be at least one brown face in the new council of ministers.

At the very least, so it was thought, the Conservatives would need to match Labour's previous record of selecting three South Asians — Keith Vaz, Sadiq Khan and Shahid Malik — to serve as junior ministers.
That pre-election expectation has been realised with the appointment of Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the new Chairperson of the Conservative Party, as a cabinet minister without portfolio in the Cameron-led coalition.

Yorkshire born Warsi, 39, is a lawyer by profession and the daughter of bus driver Safdar Hussein who migrated to Britain some 50 years ago from his home village of Pukka Khoo in Gujjar Khan, south east of Rawalpindi.

Although Warsi's admirers in the UK describe her as a liberal prepared to stand fast against those Islamic extremists who preach the politics of hate, her social and political outlook sometimes comes across as confused. For example, she is a self-declared campaigner for women's rights, yet she herself agreed to an arranged marriage at the age of 19. She has also been heard to say that she enjoys wearing the burqa when visiting Pakistan.

Her influence on British government policy, especially when it comes to foreign policy issues like Kashmir, has yet to be measured. But one delighted Pakistani website quotes her as saying that although she lives in the UK, her heart remains in Pakistan.

Overseas Indians, or NRIs (Non Resident Indians) as they are referred to back in India, are inevitably concerned about how Warsi's inclusion in the British cabinet could affect London's bilateral ties with each of New Delhi and Islamabad. But those prophets of doom who anticipate a tilt in British government perspectives away from India should also consider what would have happened if Labour had stayed in power.

There is ample evidence that the Labour Party was reviewing its previous unqualified support for India on all key issues. One measure of that changing perspective was provided at the end of May by Dennis MacShane, a Labour MP and former Minister of State in the Foreign Office.

In an article written for one of the daily broadsheets published from London, MacShane noted how 'Pakistan has to put up with condescension and patronising sneers from a pro-Indian establishment in London...India's failure to create peace on its border with Kashmir rarely if ever gets criticised.'

He goes on to argue that 'India should do more to bring stability to the region by seeking to become part of the solution to Kashmir instead of remaining part of the problem'.

MacShane's words echo those of former Labour Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who many foresee as a future Labour Prime Minister. 'Resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders,' Miliband wrote in a magazine article while Labour was still in power.

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