British cabinet minister visits ancestral village in Pakistan

Bewal: Baroness Warsi, Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister, returned to her Pakistani roots on Sunday to be feted as a heroine in her grandmother's village.

More than 2,000 people cheered and threw fragrant rose petals in the air as the chairman of the Conservative Party addressed villagers deep in rural Punjab.

"My grandmother, she was living in this village of Bewal and no one thought that her granddaughter would ever be a minister in the United Kingdom," she said in Urdu, to cries of zindabad, which means live long.

Baroness Warsi's father left Pakistan in 1960, arriving in Britain with only £2 (Dh11) in his pocket.

He went from working in a mill to running a bed manufacturing business with a turnover of £2million, providing the inspiration for Lady Warsi's Conservative politics.

Her appointment to the cabinet in May attracted headlines in Pakistan, where people are enthralled by her family's immigrant-to-minister story.

The capital, Islamabad, had been decked out with welcome banners ensuring a tumultuous welcome by the time she arrived in Bewal. Businessmen tossed handfuls of five-rupee notes in the air.

Delighted to return

Lady Warsi, 39, flanked by security guards armed with automatic weapons, said she was delighted to return to the village where her father began his journey. But she also had a serious message for her audience, some of whom had arrived carrying visa applications for trips to Britain.

Having spelt out the principles that helped her get on in Britain, she called for Pakistanis to help their country in the same way.

"You could say that with all those principles we should go to the UK," she said. "I say you can bring those principles here."

Lady Warsi has been given a roving brief in Cabinet and asked to use her Pakistani connections to help strengthen relations with Islamabad.

She is the third cabinet minister to visit Pakistan in the past six weeks, a reflection of the country's importance in terms of trade, immigration and the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.