Dear Members,
It is with great pride (and a little bit of sadness!) that we inform you that we will be stepping down as Co-Chairs of the Conservative Friends of India having completed our term in office.
We were appointed in 2019 by the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, we did not expect our five-year reign to have included a pandemic, two general elections, four Party leaders, ten Party Chairman and of course having the UK’s first Prime Minister of India origin with Rishi Sunak! We were the youngest CF Chairmen in the organisation’s history and Reena was the first female Chair. During those unexpected, unprecedented and generally unusual times CF India has been proud to have provided constant support to the Conservative Party and offer its members a wide range and variety of services.
We are both incredibly proud of what we have achieved during our term. CF India is now the largest affiliate group of the Party and we are grateful to all those who have joined our endeavours and made this milestone possible. Our combined decades experience as Party activists, Councillors, Parliamentary Candidates, as well as a number of other supporting roles has enabled us to provide a relevant service and energetic offer for our members.
Our Party Conference event remains one of conferences highlights - always full of people and food. Our selfies with the many Secretaries of State, Ministers, Members of Parliament (including Scottish) and Prime Minister have become a tradition and our stand a constant hive of activity.
Our training development programmes have helped to nurture and support our candidates and elected representatives. Our campaigning efforts have taken us to constituencies near and far for both local and national elections. Our events have engaged and been full culminating with over 600 people coming to meet Rishi Sunak during the leadership hustings. We will forever be impressed with Rishi taking the time to meet and shake everyone’s hand who had attended.
We are proud to have become an effective campaign machine for our Party. From Harrow to Slough, CF India members have bucked the trend in elections. We also made historic gains in key British Indian wards across the country. In the recent General Election, we managed to finally win Leicester East – the most British Indian seat in the country. This reflected the power of the British Indian vote, having gone from 11% in 2001 to an overwhelming 49% in 2024. This is down to decades of work of engagement and highlighting shared values with the Party – something we are hope CF India will continue to champion.
Along this we are proud to have raised funds for our Party in the process and introduced some of the Party’s most senior donors.
We would like to express a special thank you to our Director, Nayaz Qazi who has served as CF India’s longest serving director and has gone above and beyond in ways we would not have expected to keep CF India at the forefront of all that he does. CF India has also been enriched with a core group of supporters and activists, they have been the strength and purpose of our organisation and without them, we would not have enjoyed such success. Our partnership represented the true secularism of India, with a Hindu, Muslim and Sikh on the Executive.
As our term comes to an end and we now formally depart from our roles as Co-Chairs with great pride and a sense of achievement at bringing vibrancy, energy and renewed purpose to the organisation that has been an integral Party of our political journeys from the start.
This is now an apt time to allow a new leadership to rebuild. To set a new way forward and agenda for the time we find ourselves in.
On behalf of the Conservative Party, we are delighted to announce our Co-Chair successors, former Deputy Prime Minister Sir Oliver Dowden CBE MP and leading British Indian businessman and philanthropist Koolesh Shah. Their combined experience and fresh perspective promise to build upon our solid foundation and lead our organisation to even greater heights.
The new CF India team will be in touch with exciting new initiatives and events under their leadership in the coming weeks. This is truly an encouraging new chapter for Conservative Friends of India.
We wish the new team every success, as the success of our affiliate groups is our Party’s success. We will always provide CF India and its new team with our sincere and dedicated support in that endeavour.
Signing out for the very last time, we would like to thank everyone from the bottom of our hearts for all their love and support during our tenure and for making CF India what it is today.
Yours sincerely,
Reena Ranger OBE and Ameet Jogia MBE
