Senator Kamala Devi Harris is a formidable centrist candidate for Vice President of the US. As a prosecutor and state Attorney General, she built up a solid record on law enforcement, with a moderate commitment to judicial and police reform (far more evident in recent months than during her years in law enforcement). On healthcare, she is a centrist much in Joe Biden's mold. In fact, Biden probably picked her because she was so much like him in her politics ("simpatico" was his first criterion!). Like George HW Bush and Joe Biden, she has been picked because her presidential run exposed her to the whole country and demonstrated she was ready for the presidency even though she failed to win. Unlike Biden (who never led the polls in either of his previous runs for president, in 1988 and 2008), Kamala Harris was the Democratic front-runner for more than a month last year after her strong performance in the first two Democratic presidential debates.
Her Jamaican father (from whom she appears somewhat estranged) is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Stanford. He used to teach a popular course there in the Theory of Capitalist Development, and wrote a book on Capital Accumulation and its impact on income distribution. When Kamala was four, her father spent a year teaching at the Delhi School of Economics. When she was 7, her parents divorced.
Kamala's mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, had a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology from UC Berkeley, and was a reputed scientist who did cutting-edge research on breast cancer at the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, McGill University in Canada and at Berkeley. Kamala was born in Oakland, CA, and was exposed to her Indian (Tamil) roots through regular visits to India, but her mother brought her up as a black woman, taking pride in her black heritage (since that was the way she was going to be perceived in the US). Like Barack Obama, Kamala Harris has a sister called Maya.
Kamala went to Howard University (the leading historically-black university) in Washington, DC, and obtained her law degree from UC-Hastings. Her sister Maya obtained her undergraduate degree from Berkeley and her JD from Stanford Law School, a decidedly more brilliant academic record than Kamaladidi; but she had a child at 17, which complicated her life. Maya's daughter, Meena Harris, has gone on to graduate from Stanford and obtain her JD from Harvard Law School, published a children's book this year called "Kamala and Maya's Big Idea", and has previously served as Head of Strategy and Leadership at Uber! An amazingly accomplished family.
Kamala's maternal grandfather, PV Gopalan, worked in the Imperial Secretariat Service, rising through the ranks to become Joint Secretary to the Government of India. He was later sent on assignment to Zambia to head its refugee and rehabilitation office at a time when the new nation led by Kenneth Kaunda was facing an influx of refugees from Rhodesia (where a white-supremacist regime led by Ian Smith had taken over in 1964, and was to last until 1979, when the nation was renamed Zambia). Kamala apparently has fond memories of visiting her grandpa in Lusaka when she was a child.
The likely 47th President of the United States has been soaked in her Indian heritage. Let us hope it informs her policies too!
