Harris’ Indian heritage is deeply felt if little advertised

New Delhi: To most who saw the quotation being circulated this week as a meme, it was just something funny that Kamala Harris said in a speech in 2023: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

But for many Indians and Indian Americans, the line, which Harris attributed to her mother, is layered with extra meaning. Tamil Nadu, the South Indian state where her mother’s family is from, is one of India’s largest growers of coconut palms. It’s also the kind of thing an Indian parent might say.

Harris, the vice president and Democratic candidate for president, neither advertises nor shies away from her Indian heritage. She slips in references to it. She also deploys it strategically.

Last year, Harris spoke of her deep personal connection to India at a luncheon in Washington for Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, whom the United States has been courting. Harris’ introduction to the concepts of equality, freedom and democracy came from her Indian grandfather, she said, with whom she went on long walks during her visits to Chennai, India.

“It is these lessons I learned at a very young age that first inspired my interest in public service,” she said.

Harris grew up in California, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, and she identifies as Black and South Asian.

In India, her sudden elevation to likely presidential nominee after President Joe Biden’s exit from the race has added to a general sense of pride in the country’s rise in global stature. But Indian news coverage has not focused much on her Indian heritage. While Harris maintains family ties in Tamil Nadu and has talked about her visits every other year to India as a child, she has not made any official trips to India as vice president, and before that had not visited since 2009.

Her candidacy resonates more in the Indian American community, even if Harris is seen as identifying more as Black than as Indian. Many Indian Americans see Harris as another example of the diaspora’s success and influence, including in politics, with growing numbers of Indian American lawmakers and candidates at the highest levels. (The five members of the House with Indian roots sometimes use the nickname “samosa caucus.”)

When Biden chose Harris as his running mate in 2020, “there was something other than pride,” said Shoba Viswanathan, who oversees civic engagement for Indiaspora, a nonprofit. “She normalises us, in a way; she is a visible representation of Indians in public service.”

If she wins the White House, Harris seems unlikely to vastly reshape American ties to India. She does not share the same personal relationship with Modi that he was widely seen to have with her opponent in the presidential race, Donald Trump. But she would be likely to continue the Biden administration’s broad effort to bring India closer as a counterweight to China, foreign policy experts said.

Domestically, her expected nomination would be unlikely to significantly alter the voting pattern of Indian Americans, who already overwhelmingly lean Democratic, said Sanjoy Chakravorty, an author of a 2016 book on the rise of Indian Americans.

“Indian Americans are one of the most consistent Democratic voters of any ethnic group,” said Chakravorty, a professor at Temple University. “Will they be proud of Kamala Harris? For sure. Will they look to Trump with fear? For sure. Will they vote for the Democratic Party? Guaranteed.”

While many Indian Americans support Modi, a conservative Hindu nationalist, as a driver of India’s ascent, they are more politically liberal in the American context. Many of them worry about gun violence and immigration policy as well as racist or religious attacks, and they tend to view the Democratic Party as better on those issues, Chakravorty said.

Harris’ campaign could benefit financially from Indian Americans, who represent a little over 1 per cent of the US population but are among the wealthiest and most influential diaspora communities. In 2020, the community poured millions of dollars into the Biden Victory Fund, galvanized by Harris’ selection as Biden’s vice presidential pick.

In India, much of the focus on Harris’ candidacy has been about where she might take American foreign policy. If she is elected, it could do a lot to ease India’s long-standing suspicions of US intentions in the region, said Gautam Mukunda, a former research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.

The idea that “if the Americans are willing to put an Indian American in the White House, they can’t be that bad” could bring the countries closer and alter a relationship that has been more transactional and less about shared values, Mukunda said.

Modi, a consummate politician with a flair for showmanship who is determined to transform India into a superpower, did not hesitate to advertise his relationship with Trump when he was in the White House.

In 2020, Modi laid out a grand welcome for Trump’s presidential visit to India, arranging for a massive crowd to greet him. The previous year, the two leaders shared the stage at an event in Texas called “Howdy, Modi!” Thousands of Indian Americans had gathered to cheer Modi’s election win that year.

Harris and Modi have displayed no such chemistry. In 2019, Harris supported an Indian American House member, Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., when Jayapal urged the Indian government to restore phone lines and internet connections in the disputed territory of Kashmir after Modi abruptly revoked its special status.

The resolution angered the Modi government. India’s external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, refused to attend a meeting with the House Foreign Affairs Committee because Jayapal would be present.

If she wins in November, Harris will face a delicate task in navigating the relationship with Modi, said Shubhajit Roy, diplomatic editor of the newspaper The Indian Express.

She will have to balance “India’s record on human rights, her thinking on which has been pretty pronounced, and its growing role as a regional and aspirational power that provides an important counterweight to the common China threat,” Roy said. So far, American leaders have tilted much more toward wooing Modi, remaining largely silent as he has demonized India’s 200 million Muslims.

For now, though, Harris is focused on her presidential campaign. Her supporters, including Indian Americans, have taken up a social media chant: “In Sanskrit, Kamala means ‘lotus.’ In America, it means POTUS” — president of the United States.

They have also embraced the “coconut tree” quote, which Harris used while speaking at an event in May 2023. In making the point that people don’t exist in silos, she borrowed an idiom from her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who was a breast cancer researcher and died in 2009 at age 71.

“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” She added, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Initially used by Republicans to mock and exoticise Harris, the line has since become a rallying cry for her supporters, who have gleefully embraced coconut memes, coconut emojis and piña coladas.

To Mukunda, the former Harvard research fellow, the memes show a growing acceptance of diversity by many Americans that goes beyond the color of a person’s skin to include cultural references and idioms.

Coconuts have played another role in Harris’ life. When she was running for California attorney general, Harris asked an aunt who lived in Chennai to break coconuts at a Hindu temple for luck. Coconuts are considered auspicious in Hinduism and are regularly offered to the gods at religious ceremonies.