Kamala Harris’ Uncle Dr. Gopalan Balachandran Met With the Vice President Just Days Before President Biden Stepped Aside
- The 80-year-old psephologist who lives in India, dismissed J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark, and believes his niece’s chances of becoming the next U.S. President are ‘very high.’
Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance is “not a great thinker,” Kamala Harris’ uncle Dr. Gopalan Balachandran has said. Weighing in on his “childless cat ladies” remark, the 80-year-old psephologist who lives in India told The Independent that comments like Vance’s are “not worth responding to.”
Balachandran, one of the three surviving siblings of Harris’ mother Shayamala Gopalan, is an expert on U.S-India relations and security in the Asia-Pacific region. He was in Washington talking with State Department officials around the time President Biden announced he was not seeking re-election and endorsed Harris. He told the British daily The Times that he had dinner with Harris during that trip.
One of the siblings Dr. Sarala Gopalan is a gynecologist in Chennai, while another sister, Mahalakshmi (top inset), had a successful career as a civil servant before emigrating to Canada. From there, she visited America and cooked south Indian meals for Harris and her husband Douglas Emhoff, Balachandran told The Times. “Other members of the family, though, never ventured far from the ancestral village of Thulasendrapuram about 250 miles from Chennai,” he added.
In his interview with The Independent, he discussed his niece’s chances of taking the White House in November, and how her heritage could help her in the role. He believes Harris’ chances of becoming the next president are “very high,” he told The Independent. He “voiced confidence in her ability to lead, framing her Indian heritage and experience of hailing from a multicultural background as her strength – even as her Republican rivals try to use it to talk her down.” Her “steadfast belief and commitment to her principles will help her lead the U.S. to its full potential, hopefully,” he said.
“Her experience of India as one of the most heterogeneous countries in the world, with multiple major religions, languages, and customs, will help her guide the U.S. also in attaining its potential as a country with multiple nationalities, languages, and customs.”
“Her experience of India as one of the most heterogeneous countries in the world, with multiple major religions, languages, and customs, will help her guide the U.S. also in attaining its potential as a country with multiple nationalities, languages, and customs,” he said.
The impact of Harris’ win as the first woman, first Black, and first Indian American won, will be felt “more in the U.S. than in India,” Balachandran opined. “India had a woman prime minister long before.” On the other hand, in the U.S., “the symbolism will be very high and important, especially amongst girls from the Black, Indian American, and other minority communities,” he added. Meanwhile in India, “her win could perhaps also mean some greater appreciation and understanding of their view of the U.S. as an open society with full opportunities for immigrants and their own views on immigrants.”
Harris’s last visit to India is thought to have been when her mother died in 2009. Her ashes were brought back to India, a country she left when she was 18, to be immersed in the Bay of Bengal.
In the past couple of weeks, Vance has come under significant public scrutiny including over comments he made in 2021, suggesting parents should have more political power than Americans without children and calling Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats “childless cat ladies.”
Meanwhile, Politico reported today that Usha Vance has defended her husband, and downplayed his past comments about unmarried, childless women. During a“Fox & Friends” interview that aired on Aug. 5, Usha she his comment was a “quip” that opponents have taken out of context. “The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive,” she said. “And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase.”
The Independent notes that these remarks “represent just one of many personal attacks Harris has faced since President Joe Biden stepped down from the 2024 race and she launched her own presidential campaign.” Several GOP lawmakers have called Harris a “DEI” hire. Last week, Trump questioned Harris’s Black and Indian heritage, claiming that she only recently “became Black” to win votes.
(File photos of Kamala Harris with her uncle Dr. Gopalan Balachandran and her aunt Mahalakshmi, inset.)