Four years ago, on August 11, 2020, a biracial woman politician, with Indian and African ethnic roots, made history when she was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for the Vice President of the United States. The American media then rather evocatively described the senator and California attorney general as being a "heartbeat away" from being the President of the United States.

That transition may not happen as was being dramatically projected, but a progressive presidential health concerns that became a national talking point has led the US-born Indian-origin Kamala Harris, whose mother hailed from Tamil Nadu, in southern India, to be propelled almost overnight into being the putative Democratic presidential candidate with an even chance of being anointed the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2025.

And this has once again put the spotlight on the small, but respected and high-achieving Indian American community, which is just one per cent of the national population and yet has become known not just as the most educated and wealthiest community group in the US but one that is steadily growing in profile and prominence. 

As she rapidly climbed the political ladder, from a California district attorney to attorney general, the first female and African American attorney general in the country's most populous and culturally diverse state, she did not go out of her way to project her "Indianness", her Indian heritage. So in her initial years as San Francisco's black elected district attorney, she went largely unnoticed by the Indian American community. 

It was only in her 2018 memoir "The Truth We Hold: An American Journey", that she spoke fondly of her Indian roots, her grandparents in Tamil Nadu, and how she and her younger sister Maya were raised with a strong awareness and appreciation of Indian culture.  "There is no title or honour I'll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris's daughter," she wrote of her mother, a cancer researcher, whom she lost in 2009, ironically to cancer.

Trump shows desperation

It is potentially a measure of his desperation that her Republican rival Donald Trump raised a red herring to raise questions on her ethnicity, alleging that she, after being of "Indian heritage" for many years, had "turned black" only in recent years.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black?” Trump remarked at the National Association of Black Journalists, suggesting to them that her background should be investigated, an identity trope that the Republicans had brought up with Barack Obama as well during his presidential campaign.  

Harris responded strongly, while sidestepping the ethnicity slur, accusing the Republicans of taking the nation "backward" with the  "same old show, the divisiveness and the disrespect". The American people deserved better, she declared. 

As the campaign season goes in to the final leg, Trump looks poised to make his attacks more personal, more racial and even sexist, as he seems to be looking for ways to counter the mounting ratings of Harris, an opponent he had not counted on. Biden's withdrawal, his quick endorsement of his vice president and the way Harris has been able to mobilise Democratic support from across the spectrum, including from Obama and his wife Michelle, while raising record campaign funds, has thrown a spanner in Republican calculations who were counting on a facile victory.

A changing America

Trump appears to have been caught off-balance and out of touch with the mood of a demographically changing nation, which many had long foreseen. When Harris was announced as his running mate by Biden in 2020, Yonat Shimron wrote in the Religious News Service that "in a time of expanding religious pluralism, the country's younger generation, many of them children and grandchildren of immigrants, will recognise in Harris a kind of multifaith and spiritual belonging unfamiliar to the mostly-white Chritian majority of past decades". 

Four years later the same news service, while headlining its article on her "Indian and Black, Hindu and Baptist: The multiplicities of Kamala Harris", said Trump's accounting of Harris’ racial identity was curious, given that Indian Americans have at times felt that the vice president had muted her Indian and Hindu heritage in favor of her identity as a Black Baptist Christian that carried potential resonance with a larger population of American voters. 

Indian American vote

There is a lot of speculation on how the politically important Indian American community will vote. Trump had realised the community's importance early on when a Trump campaign official was quoted saying "The powerful Indian Americans are a force to reckon with today. You have not realised your own power, but President Trump understands your power".  The Trump presidency, marked by a strategic partnership with India and personal bonding between him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saw many American Hindus strongly support Trump and gravitate towards the Republican party and its conservative value systems. 

Although the majority of Indian Americans - who comprised about 2.5 million eligible voters - were still Democrat supporters, the Bush and Trump presidencies had substantially changed the perception that Republicans were not traditionally well disposed towards India as the Democrats were, with support for a close multidimensional relationship with India, especially as a hedge against China in the Indo Pacific region, garnering cross-aisle nonpartisan support. 

But Harris' nomination could tilt the scales of the community in her favour even as she is said to be also gaining  broad-spectrum support of various interest lobbies - women, Indian, South Asian, Asian,  Black, LGBTQ - because of her mixed heritage as well as her liberal-left policy stances. M R Rangaswami, Silicon Vally entrepreneur, angel investor and philanthropist, and a community leader who founded Indiaspora, said: "I never thought in my wildest dreams that we would have an Indian American running for President of the United States but this is now a reality".

Now, with Harris having narrowed the ratings considerably with some astute moves, including the choice of a Midwesterner in Tim Walz as her running mate, both Trump and Harris are running almost neck and neck in popularity ratings.  As Vice President to an ageing President, Joe Biden, she may still be a heartbeat away from the presidency till inauguration day on January 20, 2025; but as far as the presidential contest is concerned, Harris is now, as the Daily Beast put it, just a coin-toss away. 

A coin-toss contest that the Indian American community - steadily acquiring political muscle with more and more of them joining mainstream political contests as never before - and Indians across the world would be watching with acute interest.  

(The writer is a veteran journalist and author-editor of the book "Kamala Harris and the Rise of Indian Americans". Views are personal. He can be reached at tarunbasu.sps@gmail.com)