As Kamala D. Harris breaks barriers, India and Jamaica celebrate
NEW DELHI — On the road to making history, Kamala D. Harris paused for a call to India.
Early Thursday in New Delhi, her uncle Gopalan Balachandran got a message that his niece wanted to speak with him. Soon several members of the family were on a group call.
The U.S. election results were not yet final, but Harris sounded relaxed and cheerful. “I said, ‘Look, you’re winning,’ ” recalled Balachandran, 79. “Don’t worry.”
On Saturday, when the victory became official, Balachandran laughed with delight. “This is a big moment, no question about it,” he said. “It’s good for the United States. It’s good for many people.”
Harris’s groundbreaking win — she will become the first woman, the first African American and the first Indian American to become vice president — sparked jubilation thousands of miles away in her mother’s native country. And, in a reflection of her multiethnic heritage, Jamaicans also cheered Harris in the homeland of her father.
Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, left India as a young woman to study in California. There she met and married Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica.
As a child, Harris would visit her relatives in the South Indian city of Chennai and has written about how her walks with her maternal grandfather — a career civil servant — helped shape her ideals of fairness and justice.
During the campaign, Harris delighted some in India by referring to her roots. In her acceptance speech, she mentioned the support she had received from her “chittis,” a Tamil word for aunts.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had forged a close relationship with President Trump, paid tribute to Harris’s “pathbreaking” success on Twitter. It is “a matter of immense pride not just for your chittis, but also for all Indian-Americans,” he wrote.
By Joanna Slater