Indian nurse’s marathon to U K Parliament

By Joe Palathunkal

Kanakkari, June 25, 2024: Sojan Joseph has run nine international marathons for charities so far, each marathon of 42 kilometres. But, come July 4, the native of Kaipuzha in Kerala’s Kottayam district will run his longest distance to the British parliament, politically.

“Being elected as an MP in England? I never imagined he would even reach London,” says Sojan’s 85-year-old father C. T. Joseph Chamakkalayil, a farmer who has struggled with his wife Eleykkutty to bring up their three sons and four daughters.

But if poll surveys turn true, the 49-year-old male nurse from an ordinary peasant family in Kerala stands a good chance to dart across the British political horizon.

By and large, the polls say the ruling Conservatives would meet their Waterloo with the Labour Party poised to gain anywhere between 425 to 516 seats in the 650 member House of Commons.

When Sojan completed his matriculation at Kaipuzha St. George’s parish school he had only one concern – to get a job anywhere to earn a living and to support his parents.

The option for Sojan was to become a nurse. But the Kerala society then considered nursing as a girl’s prerogative, not a boy’s domain. His father recalls that their neighbors and the relatives frowned upon the idea.

Sojan gave them a rude shock with his avant-garde decision to go for nursing and his parents stood with him, despite their financial constraints. He did the three-year nursing in psychiatry at the Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Medical College in Bangalore, Karnataka.

After the course, he worked as a nurse in a north Indian hospital for a short stint and landed in London in November 2001. He joined the William Harvey Hospital as a mental health nurse in its psychiatry section Arundel Unit and moved to Ashford in September 2002. Since then, Ashford where the River Great Stour flows became his home.

The psychiatry he studied turned into a pathbreaker for his political mission. “Being in the field of mental health, I came to know people who go through difficulties that touch the core of their heart,” he said over phone recently.

When people share their pressing emotional problems, he added, they come to know their sociological causes as well. That is what prompted the matron of the mental health unit in Harvey Hospital to venture into the social field that eventually led to the political arena. His master’s degree in healthcare leadership from the UK too helped him to progress in his new leadership.

“He began to show his leadership qualities even when he was in primary school,” recalls Alice Joseph, Sojan’s eldest sister.

Sojan is now on a systematic campaign as the Labour candidate for the July 4 elections.

He says he wants to become a visible presence in his community to create a safer and healthy environment for all in Ashford.

He took to running in the mornings as an exercise as well as to give a message for all. “When I reached here, I found Asians who migrate get into health problems in the new climatic conditions. So, I thought of this.”

He is now one of the five directors of NHS Kent and Medway that plans and buys healthcare services for nearly 2 million people of the region. This has given him a wider reach to all types of people. He acknowledges that since he grew up in Kerala in the eighties and nineties the socialistic thoughts and values prevalent in the state had its definite influence on him.

This as well as his concern for the ordinary working people has drawn him to the Labour Party founded on socialism, democracy and trade unionism in 1900.

“They have a good quality of treating all as equal,” Sojan explained the reason for joining the party in 2015.

As a first step to the political terrain, he stood for the local council election in 2021 but was defeated. He then stood for the council election in 2023 and was elected as the Labour councillor for Aylesford and East Stour.

He is also involved in several public service activities and is an elected official of BAME, an acronym for the migrant Black Asian Minority Ethnic communities. Sojan married Brita, a nurse, in 2002 and they have three children – Hannah, Sarah, and Matthew. Brita is now an encouraging presence in her husband’s campaign trail.

Though the political wind favors the Labour this time, Sojan has a formidable rival in Damian Green of the Conservatives who has won from Ashford since 1997. In 2019, Green won with a margin of 24,029 votes in an electorate of 89,553.

Green was also the deputy prime minister in the Theresa May government.

Sojan may be the first Indian to stand against a deputy prime minister.

This pressure was palpable on Sojan’s face in April when he visited Kerala to observe the first death anniversary of his mother. Yet, he told a local newspaper correspondent that the chances are fifty-fifty.

Surveys and opinion polls say the Kaipuzha native has a good chance to enter the British parliament at Westminster.