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CHENNAI, India (Reuters) – Indians set off firecrackers on Sunday and offered prayers of gratitude for the election of Kamala Harris as the next vice president of the United States, declaring it a proud moment for Indian-Americans.
Harris, born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, who immigrated to the United States to study, made history by becoming the first woman to win elections for office.
In her ancestral village in southern India, about 14,000 km (8,700 miles) from Washington DC, children held Harris posters as people gathered at a Hindu temple to thank the gods for the victory that she and the president elected Joe Biden obtained.
The temple priests of the village of Thulasendrapuram bathed the local deity in milk and prayed. The women drew murals in the courtyard and the musicians played traditional music.
“A woman from this small village now holds one of the highest positions in America. It is a moment of pride,” said R. Kamaraj, a government minister in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, who joined the celebrations.
Harris identifies herself as African American, but has also spoken about her Indian heritage during the campaign. In his victory speech Saturday night, Harris said that his late mother Shyamala Gopalan was the “woman most responsible for my presence here.”
Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born head of the main opposition Congress party, described Harris as a daughter of India in a letter to the vice president-elect, inviting her to visit her.
“We look forward to the opportunity to welcome her to India soon, where she will be warmly hailed not only as a much admired leader of a great democracy, but also as a beloved daughter.”
Harris, who visited his village when he was 5 years old, often remembers taking walks with his maternal grandfather along the beaches of the southern city of Chennai during annual trips from the US.
Those conversations with his grandfather, who was among the millions who joined the Indian independence movement, left a profound impact, Harris said in a 2018 speech.
He has been in close contact with his family in India and his uncle said he planned to attend the inauguration in January.
“It’s great (the victory). It was necessary and it was good. And the next four years will be good,” G. Balachandran, a leading defense scholar, told Reuters partner ANI at his home in New Delhi, where millions of People from all over the world watched every twist and turn of the choice.
“I knew she was going to win. So, I wasn’t tense, except I wanted the final results to come in so I could go to sleep,” he said.
In Mumbai, people set off fireworks and a group of artists painted a portrait of Biden and Harris.
Dozens of prominent Indians and Americans of Indian descent took to social media to congratulate Harris, including actors Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Mindy Kaling.
Kaling tweeted pictures of Harris and wrote “Crying and holding my daughter, ‘look baby, she looks like us.”
(Additional reporting from Shilpa Jamkhandikar in Mumbai, Sunny Kataria in New Delhi; Edited by Sanjeev Miglani, Gerry Doyle and Frances Kerry)
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