Bonn’s Indian-origin mayor |
Walk round the German city of Bonn and you are likely to see the bespectacled face of Ashok Sridharan looking at you from a poster. Mr. Sridharan, a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, has been the city’s mayor since last year.While a South Asian-origin mayor in Europe is nothing unusual (earlier this year Sadiq Khan was elected as London’s), what makes Mr. Sridharan’s election striking is that he is the first Asian mayor of a German city, and that too of a city with a tiny Indian population. There are just over a thousand people with Indian citizenship and another 144 of Indian-origin in the city of 3,20,000 inhabitants. Just under a third of the entire population is of a migrant background, though mainly Turkish and Polish.His father is from Chennai.Even while growing up, his background was never an issue, despite often being the “only brown-skinned person,” whether at school, university or in the army.Mr. Sridharan believes that the positive experiences that he and his family have had — in contrast to the experience of many who moved to Europe in the middle of the 20th century — reflected the wider experience of new migrants in post-war Germany.
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