NEW DELHI – An affable elderly philanthropist advocating for simple and frugal living may not seem a likely target for social media trolling.
But when Mrs Sudha Murty, 73, wife of billionaire tech mogul N.R. Narayana Murthy, was sworn in on March 8 as an Upper House parliamentarian in India, mocking memes started circulating online.
Mrs Murty, who is British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s mother-in-law, was nominated to the Rajya Sabha – India’s Upper House of Parliament – by Indian President Droupadi Murmu for her philanthropic work and as author of multiple books including children’s titles.
Her nomination on Women’s Day elicited praise from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who called her track record in social service and writing “inspiring”.
Members of the Rajya Sabha have the same legislative rights as MPs in the Lower House, the Lok Sabha.
However, they do not take part in voting to elect India’s president.
But the appointment of Mrs Murty has triggered social media trolls.
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“Simple Sudha, gets even simpler,” said the tag line of a viral online sketch by a woman who called herself Simple Sudha.
“The rumour is, Sudha Murty humbly accepted the RS (Rajya Sabha) nomination on the condition that she will take her own chair to Parliament,” said another user on social media platform X.
Mrs Murty has previously attracted trolling for her comments, while also earning praise.
She and her husband – the co-founder of IT behemoth Infosys – have always been seen as a power couple in India, but have become even more prominent since Mr Sunak was appointed Britain’s prime minister in 2022.
In 2023, Mrs Murty said on The Kapil Sharma Show, a popular Indian chat show, that immigration staff at London’s Heathrow Airport were incredulous when she wrote down “10 Downing Street” as her residential address in-country.
Her daughter Akshata Murty and Mr Sunak, both 43, married in 2009 and have two daughters.
“That fellow (the immigration officer) looked at me and said, ‘Are you joking?’” she said.
“No one believes that I, a 72-year-old simple lady, can be the mother-in-law of the Prime Minister.”
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In other interviews, Mrs Murty revealed that she has not bought a new sari in more than two decades.
Her comments on vegetarianism on popular food show Khaane Mein Kya Hai?, or What Is There For Food?, have also attracted criticism.
“What I am scared of is that the same spoon will be used for both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. It weighs on my mind a lot! Hence, when we go out, I only search for vegetarian restaurants. Or, I carry one bag full of eatables,” she said, explaining that this included poha, or flattened rice.
While many vegetarian Indians probably related to her comments, they triggered a debate on vegetarianism and jokes about how Mrs Murty carried spoons from home while travelling.
Her comments added to an ongoing debate on whether India should become a vegetarian country amid vigilante action by Hindu right-wing nationalists opposed to the eating of beef.
India, while still having the largest number of vegetarians in the world, has a non-vegetarian majority, according to surveys.
Critics of Mrs Murty said that India does not need a billionaire’s wife to speak about simplicity.
“She is being trolled not because of simplicity. She is being trolled because people are sick of someone who is not representative of Indians and a billionaire preaching piety and purity,” author and journalist Swati Chaturvedi told The Straits Times.
But author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who wrote a book about Mrs Murty and her husband, said Mrs Murty was misunderstood, and that she was simply espousing the values she had been brought up with.
“It’s also because people don’t value some of the values that the (couple) were both brought up with, like the value of living simply. They just imbibed that from their grandparents,” said Ms Divakaruni, who interviewed the couple at length for her book titled An Uncommon Love: The Early Life Of Sudha And Narayana Murthy.
The author had studied in graduate school with Mrs Murty’s younger brother Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, an astronomer and professor at the California Institute of Technology, and has known the family for decades.
“We don’t live in a simple age right now. India is a very aspirational society. All of these are good things, and along with aspiration comes the show of aspiration. Ostentation is seen as a good thing. You prove to others that you have made it. But not everyone feels that way,” said Ms Divakaruni.
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Born and raised in Karnataka state, Mrs Murty – one of four children of a doctor father and housewife mother – was born into a conservative family that put a high premium on education.
The only woman out of 150 students in the engineering class at the B. V. Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering and Technology, she obtained a master’s in computer science and worked at Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company.
She famously challenged the company’s discriminatory hiring policy at the time, writing a postcard to its then chairman J.R.D. Tata to ask why the company was not hiring women engineers.
She was immediately called for an interview and scored a job as the company’s first engineer in the city of Pune, where she met her husband through a common friend.
The couple married in 1978 and had two children – daughter Akshata and son Rohan, who has his own automation firm.
She kept the family afloat financially as her husband built his software business, famously lending him 10,000 rupees in 1981 as seed money to start IT behemoth Infosys, which today has a market capitalisation of around 6.9 trillion rupees (S$111 billion).
Mr Murthy himself has an estimated net worth of US$4.7 billion (S$6.29 billion), according to Forbes.
Mrs Murty gave up her career as an engineer when she was in her 30s to raise her children.
Ms Divakaruni said the decision caused her immense stress, as did her husband’s refusal to allow her to join Infosys, saying that he did not want the company to be family run.
Mrs Murty later turned to teaching, writing and philanthropy, including setting up orphanages and thousands of libraries.
In 2023, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the country’s second-highest civilian award.
And now, as a parliamentarian, she told Indian media, she has another platform to continue her social work.
“I don’t think that I could consider myself a politician,” she said.
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Wife of tech mogul, mother-in-law of British PM, philanthropist: Sudha Murty enters Indian Parliament
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