The political trip of senior Kamala Harris, the first vice presidential candidate of Indian descent, has inspired millions of Indians, many of whom congratulate airmen in their ancestral city of Chennai after learning that she was named the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee .
The admiration goes both ways. The senator’s extended Indian family, particularly her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an inspiration to Harris when she reached the height of American politics, her uncle Gopalan Balachandran said in an interview at his home in the capital of India, New Delhi.
“That’s the value – the value you treat everyone equally. Don’t worry about where you are, where you go, what you eat, what dress you wear, what languages they speak. It all does not matter,” said Balachandran. “That’s what my father told me and my sister. That’s what Shyamala told Kamala and [her sister] Maya. Those are the values they have. “
These values will be seen Wednesday night when Harris, D-Calif., Calls on the Democratic National Convention to introduce itself as the first Black and Indian U.S. vice presidential candidate.
For Harris, leadership is a legacy. Her grandfather PV Gopalan was a high-ranking diplomat who played a key role in recruiting refugees from East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) in India after the horrors of the 1971 Partition War with Pakistan.
Harris ‘grandfather, who died in 1998, also gave Harris’ mother a strong sense of independence and resolution. He blessed his daughter’s decision to move to the United States in 1958 to pursue graduate studies in California, even though he learned about the opportunity only after it was accepted, Balachandran said.
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He may have accepted their choices, but that generosity of mind only expanded financially. The older Gopalan told his daughter that he would only pay for her first year of study. Then, he said, she was on her own, according to Harris’ uncle.
That was because Harris ‘grandfather expected his children to take their own course in life by using their own means – an up-by-the-bootstraps mentality that Harris’ uncle told his sister to her daughter passed on.
“Look, I can talk for hours now about Shyamala. She was a pioneer,” Balachandran said. “She was a great inspiration to Kamala and Maya. There is no question about that. She was the simplest person in her life.” Harris’ mother died in 2009.
It was not only Harris’ mother who may have been an inspiration: Balachandran himself also studied in the United States, and received his doctorate in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin. He later returned to live and work in India.
Harris’ uncle watched with admiration as Gopalan threw herself into the political bankruptcy of the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1960s, joined the growing civil rights movement for Black Americans and eventually earned her doctorate in nutrition. and endocrinology.
“At the time, there were not many Indians living in the Bay Area. And certainly not a few girls,” Balachandran said. “She did a lot of things that … very few had done then. And she did it of her own free will as a result of what she believed in.”
Harris was raised in that activist culture.
Harris “has been active in the civil rights movement since the day she was born,” Balachandran said. “Kamala went to many demonstrations from the age of 3. But in the early years, she only saw the feet around her because she was sitting in a pram.”
Balachandran is sure she would carry that same sense of racial justice to the White House, even if she was too young to remember those early days.
Among Gopalan’s troubled choices was her marriage to Harris’ father, a Jamaican student named Donald Harris, in 1963, five years after she arrived in the United States.
By both Native American and American standards, it was not a conventional race because it crossed both religious and racial boundaries. But Gopalan would not be restricted by convention, and her parents accepted the match with the same openness with whom she accepted many of her children’s choices.
Years later, Balachandran got his first glimpse of his family’s ambitious legacy in person when he saw Kamala Harris’ campaign for California’s attorney general in 2010 while still serving as San Francisco’s district attorney. she covered from 2004 to 2010.
“I knew she would go for bigger. You know she would not be satisfied with just being a district attorney,” he said. “Go to state or national level, but not until then.”
It was an ambition that Balachandran recognized. He had seen it years before, in his sister.
Gautham Subramanyam contributed.
