Discover This

Neither Tony Benn, nor Michael Foot, nor Tam Dalyell, ever made the slightest attempt to modify his accent. Many a hero of the Left has come from a privileged background either in this country or elsewhere, and not least in India. Yet Daniel Sanderson writes:

A newly elected Scottish Green politician who claimed to be from a disadvantaged background in India in fact had a privileged upbringing, including attending an exclusive private school, it can be revealed.

Q Manivannan became a Holyrood MSP this month despite being on a student visa, meaning the politician may be forced to leave the country before the term ends.

Before being elected, Manivannan, who identifies as non-binary and uses the pronouns they/them, told party members that as a “queer Tamil immigrant” they would be a voice for the “working class and marginalised”.

On the campaign trail, Manivannan claimed a disadvantaged, “lower caste” background, implying that they were among the most marginalised groups in Indian society, and said at times that they were “hungry because I was starved”.

Shortly before being elected MSP for Edinburgh & Lothians East, Manivannan also claimed “[I had] saved and worked and lied and begged” to get a PhD, from the University of St Andrews, while loved ones back home faced the “full force of digital, infrastructural, carceral, and affective violence in India”.

However, an investigation by The Sunday Times has found that Manivannan comes from an upper middle-class household in Chennai, one of India’s wealthiest, most cosmopolitan cities. Although the Scottish Greens want to ban private schooling, Manivannan attended both private high school and university, and went on to run a subsidiary of an Indian business that coaches the children of the super-rich to access the world’s elite institutions.

Manivannan claimed to have been descended from “courtesans, dancers, musicians, hunters, and prostitutes”, but the MSP’s family has in fact held professional, high-status roles for at least two generations.

The politician’s father, Manivannan Dasarathi, a tennis champion in his youth, has degrees in chemical engineering and business administration. His public profile says he has “43 years [of] industrial experience in government and private sectors in senior management positions”, including running his own advisory firm since 2004.

Manivannan’s paternal grandmother ran a medical clinic, the MSP revealed in a blog. Manivannan’s mother, Rajachitra Manivannan, has a successful career in academia and the family’s maternal grandmother was a trailblazing gynaecologist who built a hospital in the town of Tirupattur, according to an online interview with Q Manivannan’s sister. It is understood that their parents are now retired.

The family’s success allowed Manivannan to benefit from a private education out of reach of the vast majority of Indians. The MSP did not discuss their own education in India on the campaign trail, and any schooling before St Andrews is absent from Manivannan’s public LinkedIn profile.

The MSP and the party’s press office did not provide details of Manivannan’s schooling when it was requested by The Times, which asked for the information from all MSPs.

Manivannan, who was born Srivatsan Manivannan before adopting the forename Q, attended Bhavan’s Rajaji Vidyashram, a mid-range private school in Chennai, costing about £600 a year. Though the fees are modest compared with the UK, the average annual income in Manivannan’s home state is estimated to be about £3,200.

Students say it is one of the hardest institutions to get into in the city. It is known for impressive sports facilities and runs international excursions, which students fund themselves, such as trips to Nasa in the United States. Manivannan took full advantage of its extracurricular activities, running a school-linked Chennai debate club and founding a quiz club, according to public records and former students.

The MSP then went to OP Jindal Global University, in the state of Haryana, one of India’s best-known private liberal arts and law universities, taking a BA in liberal arts and humanities between 2015 and 2018.

The university caters to the upper-middle classes and is about 30 times more expensive on average than India’s more competitive, and prestigious, public universities. The total annual cost of a BA at the university, including tuition, accommodation and other extras, ranges from from £7,800 to £9,300, compared with under £300 on average at public universities.

A student from Haryana who studied at Ashoka University in Delhi, which serves a similar market, said: “It’s a fairly bougie university. Often it’s fancy kids who couldn’t go to colleges abroad who go to Ashoka and Jindal.” The student asked not to be named.

In 2019, Manivannan went to work at Essai Education, a high-end educational consultancy in Delhi that helps the children of India’s super-rich elite to get places at top international universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge.

Those who studied and worked with Manivannan in India described them as kind, conscientious and intelligent. A former colleague recalled the MSP fondly, saying Manivannan was “adorable”, “always smiling” and had a “great sense of humour”.

The job had been to assist “really high-end” clients whose teenage children would be dropped off at the offices in luxury cars by private drivers, they said.

Another former colleague at Essai said Manivannan had been “very justice orientated” helping to organise peaceful sit-in protests about a controversial citizenship law. The consultancy “paid insanely well”, she said.

Since leaving India, Manivannan has maintained close links with Essai and its subsidiary firm, Discover, which connects high school students with PhD researchers to boost their chances of getting into elite overseas boarding schools and universities.

A job advert Manivannan posted last year described Discover as “my research mentorship firm” and said the services it offered included “homework review/delivery” for high school students by PhD-level academics.

Manivannan will be obliged to declare any external income on the Holyrood register of interests. A source close to Manivannan said the MSP was now working with Discover in a voluntary and advisory role but had been phasing it out since the election.

The Scottish Tories said that members of the Scottish Greens, a party with a co-leader who unapologetically favours a ban on private education, might not have supported Manivannan’s candidacy in such high numbers had they known about this privileged upbringing and apparent interest in private education.

Despite having joined the Scottish Greens only in January last year, thanks to internal elections Manivannan was ranked third by members on the party’s candidate list in Edinburgh & Lothians East, where the party has its highest support, in July.

Under Holyrood’s electoral system, in which voters back a party rather than an individual with their second ballot, the number of votes cast for the Greens in Edinburgh & Lothians East was more than enough to get Manivannan a parliamentary seat.

In the candidate statement, the MSP described themselves as a “queer Tamil immigrant” and a “community organiser, teacher, and policy expert” who would fight for “radical change” for the marginalised working class.

A spokesman for the Scottish Tories said: “It appears that Q Manivannan has questions to answer after apparently pulling the wool over the eyes of the Scottish Greens.

“This new MSP wouldn’t be the first left-wing politician to embellish their supposedly working-class credentials to curry favour. But the public expect those they elect to be transparent and honest about their life before politics, rather than peddling false information about what they have done and where they came from.”

By 2020, Manivannan was in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin, studying for a Master of Philosophy in international peace studies. The following year they enrolled at St Andrews in Fife, and two months ago submitted a PhD thesis on “narrating anti-authoritarian resistance”, in pursuit of a doctorate in philosophy.

Dublin and St Andrews are two of the most notoriously expensive places to study as students in the UK and Ireland, outside of London. Fees for international students for the MPhil programme at Trinity are currently €18,720 (£16,200) per year. It is understood that Manivannan took out a loan to support their studies and received a scholarship that went towards undergraduate fees.

Manivannan’s older sister, Aishwarya, travelled to Edinburgh to watch them take the oath to become an MSP this month.

She founded what was described as “Chennai’s premier academy for art & design foundation studies, portfolio development, creative programs, and career mentoring” in 2012, which also offers bespoke private services to help students get into some of the world’s best visual arts institutions. Its headquarters is in the upmarket Adyar district of the city.

Aishwarya also benefitted from a private education, including a qualification from Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore, the leading institution of its kind in Asia. For non-funded, international students a BA programme costs about £22,000 per year. It is not known whether she received a scholarship.

Manivannan recently sent a message to Green members “begging for cash” to help pay for visa costs. An online crowdfunder set up by Manivannan, since deleted but seen by The Sunday Times, showed that £1,066 had been donated towards the £2,089 cost of applying for a graduate visa, which would allow another three years in Britain.

Manivannan made clear that they will apply for a longer-term global talent visa, which costs £5,049. The crowdfunder said “I already qualify for a global talent visa”, although independent experts questioned the claim, saying it was unlikely that the MSP would receive one under strict rules./ Although approval for a graduate visa is expected to be a formality, it would allow Manivannan to remain in the UK only until 2029. The Holyrood term runs until the spring of 2031.