Rishi Sunak wins the Conservative leadership race in the UK on Monday, becoming the first black prime minister to rule a country that once ruled India, much of Africa and beyond.

It happened at the beginning of Diwali. The Hindu Festival of Lights celebrates the triumph of good over evil – and for some religious it was a congruence written in the stars.

India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated his co-religionist on Twitter while extending Diwali wishes to the “living bridge” of British Indians as a whole.

British-born Sunak’s success also spread across the Atlantic.

Ro Khanna, a Democratic member of Congress representing part of California’s Silicon Valley, said his own grandfather fought against British rule in India for years.

“It is remarkable to see that @RishiSunak, an Indian Briton of Hindu faith, became Prime Minister on Diwali. Regardless of politics, this is a symbolic move to move beyond the world of a colonizer,” he tweeted.

But for many British South Asians, as for the country at large, the arrival of Britain’s first black Prime Minister sparked as much debate about his economic credo as the color of his skin.

At the country’s largest Hindu temple in the London borough of Neasden, many Diwali fans basked in Sunak’s rise.

“It’s a great day for the Indian community … but more than that, it’s a time when we look back and ask ourselves, ‘How can we move forward from here?'” financial analyst Kirtan Patel told AFP in the Temple.

Anand Menon, a professor of politics at King’s College London, said Sunak’s ethnicity was “a really, really big deal”.

But he added on BBC TV: “What actually reassures me the most is how little comment there has been on it, in the sense that we seem to have normalized this.”

If it feels “normalized” now, a brown or black prime minister would have been unimaginable in Britain just a few years ago.

When Sunak was born in 1980, there had been no Asian or black MPs since World War II.

A handful were then elected to the opposition Labor Party. But the Conservatives still had none when Sunak graduated from Oxford University in 2001.

In the late 1960s, many were under the spell of the hotheaded Tory Enoch Powell, who warned of a racist civil war if mass immigration from the old empire continued.

Polls at the time showed that a majority of white Britons agreed with Powell.

According to Sunder Katwala, director of demographics think tank British Future, “most people in the UK are now right in saying that the Prime Minister’s ethnicity and beliefs shouldn’t matter”.

“They will judge Sunak on his ability to sort out the chaos in Westminster, put public finances in order and restore political integrity,” he said.

“But we should not underestimate this important social change.”

Sunak’s reception among South Asians was anticipated by Conservative politicians such as Priti Patel, Britain’s first ethnic Indian home secretary.

Patel’s flagship policy of sending would-be migrants to Rwanda on a one-way ticket met with disbelief from many given her own family’s flight from persecution under Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

When Sunak’s census was announced, Patel tweeted images of a Diwali visit to a Hindu temple, declaring, “It’s a time for self-reflection, family, friends and service to others.”

“A period of self-reflection would do you good,” was one of the more polite tweets in response.

The Conservatives have been better at cultivating ethnic Indian – and women – politicians in their top echelons than Labour, and they often outperform their white counterparts in appealing to the hard-line right.

Patel’s short-lived successor, Suella Braverman, whose family was also from India, was even more vocal about migration. Her views helped dispel fading hopes of a UK-India free trade deal by Diwali.

For many observers, the Tories still suffer from a lack of viewpoints given the elite Oxford education given to Sunak and Truss – as well as Boris Johnson and most other post-war Prime Ministers before them.

Sunak’s appointment, which coincides with a new king in Charles III, “tells an important story about our society, where we came from and where we are going in the future,” Katwala said.

But he added: “I hope Sunak will recognize that not everyone has enjoyed its benefits in life. Rishi Sunak reaching 10 Downing Street does not make Britain a perfect meritocracy.”