The candidate with the most votes will win the race and be declared Prime Minister of the UK.
London:
Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Attorney General Suella Braverman are two Indian-origin members of parliament who made the initial shortlist of eight candidates in the race to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader and British prime minister at the end of the nominations on Tuesday evening.
Others who made it to the ballot paper include Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, new Chancellor Nadim Xahavi, Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, former cabinet ministers Cami Badenoch and Jeremy Hunt, and Tory backbencher Tom Tugendhat.
Mr Sunak, who formally launched his campaign earlier, is reportedly the frontrunner with the most number of MPs. “I am running a positive campaign that focuses on what my leadership can offer our party and our country,” the 42-year-old Conservative leader said at the launch of his campaign.
Earlier, Ms Braverman, 42, said she had “got the numbers” to vote in the leadership race.
Ms Braverman, whose parents immigrated to the UK from Kenya and Mauritius respectively in the 1960s, has been Member of Parliament for Fareham since 2015.
Candidates needed the support of at least 20 lawmakers to make the first cut and all eight will now face a first round of voting on Wednesday and only those who have the support of at least 30 lawmakers – or just Tory lawmakers. Less than 10 percent – will advance to the second round.
As nominations closed, two Pakistani-origin candidates – former Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Foreign Office Minister Rehman Chishti – withdrew from the race after not meeting the 20-MP mark. “Our party is full of both ideas and talent. A candidate will be given the honor of becoming the prime minister,” Javid said.
A second ballot on Thursday will further narrow the field as the candidates with the fewest votes are being knocked out.
There is a provision for more ballots next week if the race to reach the last two candidates is not over by the end of this week.
The deadline for narrowing the shortlist to only the two remaining candidates is July 21, when Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee, will also seek assurances that the two finalists will continue to race to face a wider party membership ballot.
The 1922 committee in charge of the timetable for the leadership race stated that the new Tory leader would be announced on 5 September and that his first prime ministerial questions would be addressed in parliament on 7 September. After narrowing the field to the final two candidates, the two would tour parts of the UK to campaign for an estimated 200,000 Tory Party members, who would then cast a postal ballot for the winner based on a one-member, one-vote system.
The candidate with the most votes will win the race and be named the new Tory leader and Prime Minister of the UK.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)