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The political journey of Senator Kamala Harris, India’s first vice presidential candidate, has inspired millions of Indians, many of whom waved congratulatory banners in her ancestral city of Chennai after learning she had was appointed Democratic candidate for vice-presidency.
Admiration goes both ways. The senator’s extended Indian family, especially her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, were an inspiration to Harris as she reached the pinnacle of American politics, her uncle Gopalan Balachandran said in an interview at her home in the United States. Indian capital, New Delhi.
“It’s value – the value that you treat everyone equally. Don’t worry about where you come from, where you’re going, what are you eating, what dress you’re wearing. , of the languages they speak. question, “Balachandran said.” That’s what my father told me and my sister. That’s what Shyamala said to Kamala and [her sister] Maya. These are the values they have. “
Those values will be on display Wednesday night when Harris, D-Calif., Addresses the Democratic National Convention to run as the first black and Indian American vice-presidential candidate.
For Harris, leadership is a legacy. His grandfather PV Gopalan was a highly regarded diplomat who played a key role in the resettlement of refugees from East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) to India after the horrors of his Partition War with Pakistan in 1971.
Harris ‘grandfather, who died in 1998, also gave Harris’ mother a fierce sense of independence and determination. He blessed his daughter’s decision to move to America at age 19 in 1958 to pursue higher education in California, even though he only learned of the opportunity after being accepted, Balachandran said.
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He may have accepted his choices, but this generosity of spirit has only extended so far financially. Elder Gopalan told his daughter that he would only pay for her first year of school. After that, he said, she was alone, according to Harris’ uncle.
It was because Harris ‘grandfather expected his children to make their own way in life using their own means – a starting mindset Harris’ uncle said his sister passed on to him. her daughter.
“Look, I can talk for hours about Shyamala now. She was a pioneer,” Balachandran said. “She was a great inspiration to Kamala and Maya. There is no doubt about it. She was the most important person in their lives.” Harris’s mother died in 2009.
It wasn’t just Harris’s mother who may have been a source of inspiration: Balachandran himself also studied in the United States, receiving his doctorate in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin. He then returned to live and work in India.
Harris’ uncle watched with awe as Gopalan threw himself into the political turmoil of the University of California, Berkeley campus in the early 1960s, joined the burgeoning black American civil rights movements, and ultimately secured his doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.
“At the time, there weren’t many Indians living in the Bay Area. And certainly no single girls, ”Balachandran said. “She did a lot of things that … very few had done back then. And she did it of her own accord because of what she believed in.”
Harris was raised in this militant culture.
Harris “has been active in the civil rights movement from the day he was born,” Balachandran said. “Kamala has been to many demonstrations from the age of 3. But in the early years, she could only see the feet around her because she was sitting in a stroller.
Balachandran is sure she would carry that same sense of racial justice to the White House, even if she was too small to remember those early days.
Among Gopalan’s daring choices was his marriage to Harris’ father, a Jamaican graduate student named Donald Harris, in 1963, five years after arriving in America.
By Indian and American standards, this was not a conventional match, as it flouted religious and racial boundaries. But Gopalan would not be bound by the convention, and his parents accepted the game with the same open-mindedness with which they accepted many of their children’s choices.
Years later, Balachandran got his first glimpse of his family’s ambitious legacy in person when he saw Kamala Harris campaigning for the post of California attorney general in 2010 while still a district attorney. of San Francisco, a position she held from 2004 to 2010.
“I knew she would go further. You know she wouldn’t be content to just be a district attorney,” he said. “Either go to the state level or to the national level, but not before.”
It was an ambition recognized by Balachandran. He had seen it years earlier, at his sister’s.
Gautham subramanyam contributed.
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