HE REMAINS the only south Asian civil servant to have reached the top tier of British government in the country’s history.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti may have left government in 2012 as permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), but his reputation as someone who gets things done means he is much sought after.
In July 2020, Sir Suma left the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) after eight years, and two elections, as its president.
He told the GG2 Power List, “Well, I failed to take the advice that everyone gives you that you should take your time and, you know, be choosy, take some months off. So, I’ve ended up doing a lot more than I had bargained for.
But it’s been fun. I’ve been an adviser to the presidents of both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan on economic development, and governance.”
As always, Sir Suma’s role is to observe, ask tough questions, analyse and advise without pulling punches. “I’ve been advising them on issues of strategy and reform on government, on organisational capability, delivery and domestic communications and international branding. And that’s taking up a lot of my time because it has involved quite a bit of travel to both countries.”
When you look at his impressive CV, it is little wonder he was chosen to advise two different heads of state. At 18, Oxford University beckoned, where he read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE). In 1984, he joined the Overseas Development Administration (ODA), which was the predecessor to the now defunct Department for International Development (DfID). He was a senior economic assistant working on macroeconomics issues and UK aid projects. Very soon, Sir Suma would move to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. His rise was meteoric, and in 2002, aged 42, he became the youngest permanent secretary since the second world war.
“Some people want to celebrate, some people thought it was just very odd. How could this have happened if it hadn’t been for some sort of tokenistic promotion? Because at that time, the Blair government was saying we want more women, more ethnic minorities, nearer the top of the civil service. So, was I just a token? But if you keep getting these jobs, you stop feeling like an imposter because you can’t really believe that all these jobs have simply been got because of your colour.”
Sir Suma must never eat nor sleep because the rest of his time appears to be filled to capacity. This year he came back full circle, returning to the organisation where he began his impressive career. “I’ve been chairing the ODI, the British development think-tank. We’re just about to approve our new strategy for the next five years in the next day or so actually,” he reveals.
“I’ve also been sitting on a couple of commissions as well. The WHO (World Health Organization) commission on how European and Central Asian health systems will have to reboot themselves post-Covid. What are the sort of issues we might be looking at? I’ve been sitting on a commission for smart government in the UK, really looking at how, not just the civil service and civil servants, but how ministers, parliamentarians, ought to be thinking of changing the way we do things, in terms of delivering better governance in the UK as well.
So, I’ve been pretty busy.”
It may be because of his upbringing that Sir Suma works so hard. The family returned to India after his father finished his doctorate at Oxford. But political turmoil in Calcutta (as it was then) meant the tough decision of Sir Suma coming to the UK with his mother, while his father remained in West Bengal to pursue an academic career.
In essence, he recalls, he was brought up in the 1970s solely by his mother.
“You could imagine a lone parent at that time in the seventies. An Indian woman working full time, and not many people in the Indian community liked that very much.
So, I think she had her own struggles with that.
She was extremely courageous, very resilient to handle all of that. Those are two characteristics I really learned from her actually, just observing how she operated. She was a very extrovert personality as well, and able to make things, always very successful in her work. So, she was very, very important to my teenage years in particular, in how I turned out.”
And it was not always a charmed life. Sir Suma faced the casual racism of 1970s Britain growing up, and he joined the Anti-Nazi League, going on demonstrations before going up to Oxford. This determination to seek equality for all is a feature throughout his career.
While in the civil service, he proudly mentored other black, Asian minority ethnics (BAME) colleagues, ensuring they made it to senior positions.
But it was an unexpected battle in the boardroom at the EBRD, where he faced racism head on, which showed his steely determination.
In his leaving speech, which the GG2 Power List has seen from other sources, Sir Suma spoke about his experiences.
“I will not miss the stares when I entered the board room in 2012. It felt like entering an English pub when I was a teenager in the 1970s. I will not miss the ‘dog whistle’ messages from some capitals that I was ‘not truly European’ or ‘too global’ for their tastes, real quotes never said to my face but to my colleagues.
“What I say about racism, I could say about all other forms of diversity. To have the advice of one of my female members of ExCom [executive committee] recently described at a board committee meeting as ‘emotional’ is just another example of unacceptable behaviour. I cannot imagine that would have been said to a man.”
Sir Suma makes no secret that in 2018 he was subjected to a “Kafkaesque like” internal investigation at EBRD after a complaint from some directors at the bank. Even though he was completely exonerated, the GG2 Power List has learned that a minority of directors who complained did not like that he wanted to expand the countries in which EBRD operated to include sub-Saharan Africa.
“At 61, all this is nothing new. Depressingly so,” says Sir Suma in his leaving speech. “But I still feel anger because I will never accept explicit or implicit racism. It still wounds and it must be challenged. And challenged across all the areas of diversity. And if it is bad ethics, it is also bad business. All the research shows diversity in all its forms improves the performance of organisations.”
He is a pioneer who has faced and overcome personal and professional adversity, and he continues to influence on a global stage.
