KAMALA HARRIS: A Fresh, Multi-coloured Flower in White House?*

KAMALA HARRIS: A Fresh, Multi-coloured Flower in White House?*

By Satendra Nandan

 Emeritus Professor Satendra Nandan’s new Book, GIRMIT: Epic Lives in Small Lines, will be published in October. His Gandhianjali came out in July.

Kamala Devi Harris is an exciting and historic choice for the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nomination for the forthcoming US presidential elections on November 3.

 She certainly adds colour to a rather drab campaign with COVID-19 and with Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Joe Biden : three White males.

Kamala Harris, the first coloured woman to be elevated to such a position, will bring the chemical change essential to the most militarily powerful and richest nation on earth. And in such a mess and general distress.

 Today’s tragic news is that more than 200,000 Americans have died, so far, victims of COVID-19 while the president claims to be in control of everything, ignoring scientific advice.

Ms Harris’s  mother Shyamala Gopalan had left India in 1958, aged 19, to study at the university of Berkeley in the USA when the immigration laws were relaxed for immigrants from non-white regions. She married a Jamaican in 1964; Kamala Harris was born in California on October 20, 1965, 55 years ago.

 Ms Gopalan  travelled  to the USA against her  extended conservative family’s wishes, exactly what Gandhi had done more than a century ago: he defied his caste and clan to cross the kalapani, black waters, to study law in England. He was ostracized.

I’ve a feeling that  Shyamala’s parents were touched by what the mahatma had shown women of India are capable of doing. With his remarkable wife Kasturba,  young Gandhi had come in contact  with some precocious  women in South Africa: Hindus, Muslims, Christian and Jewish among a few Chinese and Parsis. He made them part of his satyagraha movement, fighting for many kinds of freedom.

 Gandhi also knew and experienced the trust and courage of  the Tamil indentured women.They gave him implicit support in his battles in South Africa. The Tamil women from Chennai must have seen what an Indian woman can achieve despite their oppressive shackles of caste and patriarchy.

This is perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of the Mahatma. It was on his South African farms, Tolstoy and Phoenix, that women felt at home and shared deep friendships with men. Although Indian mythology and legendary history, with its  spirituality , has many examples of brave warrior queens and notable self-sacrificing women, the equality of friendship between men and women is rarely given expression.

That Gandhi changed all that is another of his remarkable ,radical achievements. His many-splendored philosophy of freedom affected the people of South India profoundly: two of its most eminent writers, Raja Rao and R K Narayan, wrote their novels on Gandhi’s life and work.

Shaymala Gopalan must have been touched by the Gandhian waves that swept across India and continued to inspire millions after his assassination. Luckily her grandfather, though a traditional person, had a liberated imagination. He had worked in Zambia where Kamala Harris spent part of her childhood.

When her mother decided to go to Berkeley to study, she had the generous support of her father. Thus new and exciting leaders are created even in the humblest of families and radical thinkers come out of the most conservative communities.

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Kamal Harris is a junior senator from California. She was also the Attorney-General of the state of California, with the fifth largest economy in the world and a population of around 40 million.

On January 21, 2019, she announced she was running to be the Democratic candidate in the Presidential race. By December she withdrew her candidature and endorsed Joe Biden, the vice-president to Barrack Obama’s presidency for eight years. On August 11, 2020, Biden chose her as his running mate.

Kamala is the first coloured woman in the USA to be so honoured: she has triple inheritance: the first African woman, the first African-Asian, and first person of Indian heritage to be elevated to this position. She has both the heritage of slavery from her Jamaican father, and  immigrant connections with her Indian mother. In between is her American heritage. Her first name means a flower.

This is her multiple identity and this should make some difference to her thinking and the perceptions of others about her.

I’m not overwhelmed by identity politics: it’s enough to be a citizen of a decent country. No-one in the US can be elected without White votes. Obama showed that a man of vision, charisma, intelligence and basic decency can be elected by votes of a dominant race.

And the USA has shown that just as in India two Dalits have held the highest office of the President of the Republic. Democracy makes it all possible and shows immense possibilities.

The 2020 US presidential elections will be most consequential for the USA and the world. Donald Trump’s four years are coming to an end in confusion and chaos with COVID-19 adding its own disasters.

Of more consequence though is Kamala Harris’s choice as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate.  Win or lose, come 2024 Kamala Harris is likely to be the President of the USA.

Joe Biden will be 78 years old in November this year. Most observers think, if he wins, he’ll not seek a second term. But one can’t rule  out ambition: Mahatir Mohammed became the PM of Malaysia at the age of 92. And many so-called postcolonial prime ministers and presidents are difficult to dislodge from the Lodge: Robert Mugabe comes easily to mind.

Be that as it may, Joe Biden seems a man of character: his personal tragedies, his quiet loyalty Barack Obama are qualities that should make a President the world can trust. Our free world may get some stability and prosperity and peace. And international relations grow based on international law. Besides   Joe Biden will bring a healing touch to a deeply divided America.

Whatever our political ideologies and preferences, the USA matters not because it continues to be the largest economy and most powerful military presence but it’s a great democracy with its many flaws but freedom is its song of the road.

Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’(MAGA) became a divisive mantra chanted by racial and rightwing supremacists and religious fundamentalists.

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The USA presidential election will be held on November 3, 2020. Voting in the USA, unlike in Australia, is not compulsory.

The most popular candidate doesn’t necessarily win: Hilary Clinton got almost 3 million votes more than Trump. Yet she lost. The  complicated US State Electoral College decides the final outcome. Some constitutional experts say this archaic electoral system should be abolished .

The president should be elected directly by popular votes .

The term is for four years with a maximum of two terms: although on his unenviable record, Trump has claimed that he deserves a third term! Such is the man’s ambition who held no political office before he became the President and was impeached but acquitted.

The price of democracy can be egregiously high. As they say first time it may be a farce; second time it’s always a tragedy. Think of the two Fijian coups of 1987.

Kamal Harris may bring a few humane and new ideas about American treatment of migrants,  climate change,thoughts regarding building walls in a world where we are tired of walls, her passion for human rights, medical care, and the advancement of women, especially Black and coloured. Justice seems the core of her political philosophy.

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America’s relationship with India may undergo some sea-change. She is  an ardent advocate of human rights of minorities. And with Israel in the maze of Middle East political upheavals.  China, of course, will be Biden-Harris’s greatest challenge. How they deal with an emerging super power will determine the fate of many, including our region.

Kamala Harris married  Douglas Emhoff,a lawyer with Jewish background,, in 2014 through a kind of ‘arranged marriage’.

Such varied background adds dimensions to this 55-year old Asian-African-American vice-presidential nominee of the progressive Democratic Party.

If Biden-Harris combination win the White House , Americans may, once again, explore what Martin Luther King Jr meant by “I have a Dream”.

And, once again ,All Lives may begin to matter. A woman of diverse inheritance may help make that dream a reality.

 *First published in FIJISUN on Thurday, 17 September, 2020.