[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.]
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.
World
looks at Biden policy shifts after turbulent Trump era
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.
The pride in Harris’s
achievement was felt all the way from India’s capital to the seaside
neighborhood in Chennai where her grandparents lived to Thulasendrapuram, the
small village in southern India where her grandfather was born.
Earlier in the week,
residents of Thulasendrapuram held a special ritual at a local Hindu temple to
pray for a Biden-Harris victory. The election was finally called late Saturday
night in India, but plans for a celebration in the village the next morning
were rapidly taking shape, including setting off firecrackers and distributing
sweets.
[Trump
berated and baffled European allies. They aren’t sad to see him go.]
“This is huge for
us,” said Kalidas Vandayar, a businessman who lives just outside
Thulasendrapuram. “We are certain that Biden and Kamala D. Harris will be
better for India than Trump was.”
Rahul Gandhi, India’s
main opposition leader, offered his hearty congratulations. “It makes us proud
that the first woman to serve as vice president of the USA traces her roots to
India,” he wrote on
Twitter.
M.K. Stalin, a
political leader in the state of Tamil Nadu, expressed his delight that the
American people had “chosen a
woman with Tamil heritage as their next Vice-President in this
historic election.”
There was similar
pride in Jamaica. “To have one of our own reach one of the highest seats on the
world stage is humbling and profound,” said Latoya Harris, 39, a policy
analyst. She and the vice president-elect are second cousins.
Jamaica’s prime
minister, Andrew Holness, saluted Harris’s “monumental
accomplishment for women” as well as her Jamaican heritage.
There was celebration
in another corner of the world, too. In Ballina in northwest Ireland, a bottle
of champagne was popped on the main street and American flags flew from homes
and pubs in the ancestral home of the Biden family.
Back in India,
Harris’s uncle Balachandran had spent days watching the results on a squat
Panasonic television tuned to CNN, his laptop open to Arizona’s ballot-counting
website.
Now he plans to
celebrate with a slice of chocolate cake and a glass of wine — and later with a
trip to Washington to see his niece sworn in as vice president.
Mostly his thoughts
were of his sister Shyamala, Harris’s mother, who died in 2009. Balachandran
said Shyamala told her two daughters, “Whatever you study or learn, see how you
can use it for the good of society,” he recalled.
Over the course of the campaign,
Balachandran became a minor celebrity himself. After the vice-presidential
debate, a clip of him describing his niece’s performance went viral on social
media with more than 1 million views (one Twitter user summed up the
sentiment: “How can you
not love this guy?”).
As the votes were being counted, he
sat for interviews in three languages — English, Tamil and Hindi — in his
driveway. He specialized in a kind of amiable exasperation, especially when
asked about Harris’s favorite Indian foods (she reportedly enjoys idlis and
dosas, both South Indian staples).
By Friday, he was losing patience with
the trickle of election returns. “Bloody hell it’s slow!” he exclaimed. But the
Biden campaign’s progress toward victory, he said, was “like a juggernaut . . . steady
but inexorable.”
Harris will be “a great asset to
Biden,” he said, adding: “Let’s not kid ourselves: what was at stake was
whether the United States remains the United States.”
Niha Masih in New Delhi, Kavitha
Muralidharan in Chennai and Kate Chappell in Kingston, Jamaica, contributed to
this report.
