Kamala Harris as U.S. Presidential candidate: a look at her India connection

2024 U.S. election: Kamala Harris is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris who comes from a family of achievers in Tamil Nadu. Ms. Gopalan Harris was a cancer researcher and civil rights activist in California.

U.S. President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race on July 21, clearing the way for his deputy Kamala Harris to be the Democratic candidate of choice. Although it wasn’t immediately clear if other senior Democrats would challenge Ms. Harris for the party’s nomination, Mr. Biden endorsed her to be the party’s presidential candidate.

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“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this,” he wrote in a post on X.

In 2020, Ms. Harris became the first Indian-American and first African-American woman Vice-President of the U.S., and will be looking to repeat the feat as the President too, if Democrats approve her as the party candidate to run the 2024 presidential race.

Ms. Harris is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris who comes from a family of achievers from Tamil Nadu.

Ms. Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist in California, raised Kamala and her sister Maya as a single mother.

VP Harris’ maternal uncle Gopalan Balachandran, a former consultant at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), is an academic based in Delhi. Her grandfather P.V. Gopalan worked on the rehabilitation of refugees from East Pakistan in India. Later in his life, he became an advisor to the Zambian President and lived in Lusaka, while his wife Rajam built a reputation for her social work.