Whatever the outcome of Thursday’s general election in the UK, two Punjabi NRIs and prospective parliamentary candidates, known locally as PPCs, are on course to enter the record books.

Manish Sood, whose family originates from Ludhiana, and Paul Uppal, a clean shaven Sikh whose father migrated to the UK from Kenya in 1962, have each captured the public imagination and for different reasons.

Analysts have been saying the election is too close to call, although some opinions have been predicting that David Cameron’s Conservative Party will end up with the largest number of seats and even possibly with a wafer thin majority. In that scenario it is the Liberal Democrats, also known as the LibDems, who could play a key role in deciding which party or parties form the new government.

In this neck-and-neck scenario, attention has inevitably focused on who will make the difference in marginal constituencies. Research carried out earlier this year showed that NRIs could make or break candidates in some 25 constituencies. These are the constituencies where NRIs amount to a substantial 40 per cent or more of voters.

More than the number of voters, however, is the quality and sheer number of NRIs standing for each of the three main parties. Never before have so many NRIs been fielded as PPCs by the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties.

Enter Manish Sood, a 38-year-old Leicester City councillor, who is fighting the North West Norfolk constituency for the Labour Party. North West Norfolk is a safe Conservative seat and Sood has absolutely no chance of winning it on behalf of Labour. What has, however, shot him into the spotlight is his extraordinary attack on the Prime Minister and party leader Gordon Brown.

“I believe Gordon Brown has been the worst prime minister we have had in this country,” Sood told a local Norfolk newspaper. “It is a disgrace and he owes an apology to the people and the Queen.”

Contacted by The Tribune, Manish’s mother Manjula, a former Lord Mayor of Leicester, said, “The party ruling is that I should not comment. As a mother it is a different issue, but for a few weeks I haven’t been communicating with my son.”

In an earlier comment to the Leicester media, she said, “My son holds his own views but I’m very angry about this and very angry about him.” She was later quoted as saying that Manish was still grieving for his late father.

Mrs Sood’s party colleagues agree with her. The chairman of the North West Norfolk Constituency Labour Party described Manish’s comments as “bizarre” and Justice Secretary Jack Straw has gone as far as describing him as a “complete maverick.”

Whether Manish’s views will influence voters remains to be seen. But his comments were broadcast nationwide and they add to the public relations disaster that has been hovering over Labour in the last days of the election campaign.

Gordon Brown, who lacks the charisma of his predecessor, Tony Blair, was personally humiliated only a few days earlier when his description of a lifelong Labour voter as a “bigoted woman” was broadcast on a live microphone.

If Manish Sood represents the face of disillusioned Labour NRIs, the opposite is true of the 42-year-old Paul Uppal who was born in Birmingham but whose ancestors are from Jalandhar. A devout Sikh and a businessman, who is also the trustee of a large gurdwara in Wolverhampton, he is among those middle class NRIs who have been successfully wooed by the Conservatives to cross over to their side. For that reason alone Uppal’s campaign is worthy of notice.

But there is another and even more important reason why Uppal merits attention. He is standing as the Conservative candidate in Wolverhampton South West that was formerly held by Enoch Powell. It was while he was a Woverhampton MP in 1968 that Powell delivered his infamous “rivers of blood” speech, predicting disaster after disaster for the UK if immigration was not strictly controlled.

“We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population”, Powell said in his speech at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.”

It was this speech that prompted anti-racist demonstrators to chant “Disembowel Enoch Powell” and for Wolverhampton South West to be remembered thereafter as the least progressive of all the Conservative Party strongholds in the country.

Labour took the seat in the 1997 election with a total of 24,657 votes, representing a 10.5 per swing away from the Conservatives. Labour continues to hold the seat, but its majority has been on a steady decline since the 1997 peak. A small two-and-a-half per cent surge in favour of David Cameron could easily return the seat to the Conservatives with Uppal as the local MP finally casting out the shadow of Powell and turning history on its head.