Just who is Kamala Devi Harris?

As soon as US Democratic Party candidate Joseph Biden announced that Californian Senator Kamala Devi Harris was going to be his running mate, social media has been buzzing with stories about the mixed-race candidate who has enjoyed a meteoric rise on the US political scene.

Kamala is the first African American and the first Asian American to be chosen as the running mate of a major party's presidential candidate, but it's no surprise to those following her career.

The daughter of Shyamala Gopalan, a Chennai-born cancer researcher, and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica, she was born in Oakland, California, on Oct 20, 1964.

Her parents met in the early 1960s at the Berkeley campus of University of Califonia, where they were pursuing post-graduate studies and shared a passion for the civil rights movement in an increasingly radicalised United States that was energised by Martin Luther King, shattered by the assassination of President John F Kennedy and soon to be deeply divided over the war in Vietnam.

Her parents divorced in 1971 and Kamala and her younger sister Maya were raised by their mother. As a child, she attended both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple, reflecting her diverse roots.

When still young children, Kamala's mother brought the girls to visit India, where young Kamala became close to her grandparents, who were part of Tamil Nadu's educated elite.

Her grandfather was a high-ranking government official who fought for Indian independence while her grandmother was an activist who travelled the countryside teaching impoverished women about birth control.

"My mother was very proud of her Indian heritage and taught us, me and my sister Maya, to share the pride of our culture. We used to go back to India every couple of years," she said in a 2009 interview.

"One of the most influential people in my life, in addition to my mother, was my grandfather PV Gopalan, who actually held a post in India that was like the secretary of state position in this country.

"My grandfather was one of the original Independence fighters in India, and some of my fondest memories from childhood were walking along the beach with him after he retired and lived in Besant Nagar, in what was then called Madras.

"He would take walks every morning along the beach with his buddies who were all retired government officials, and they would talk about politics, about how corruption must be fought and about justice.

"They would laugh and voice opinions and argue, and those conversations, even more than their actions, had such a strong influence on me in terms in terms of learning to be responsible, to be honest, and to have integrity.

"When we think about it, India is the oldest democracy in the world. So that is part of my background, and without question has had a great deal of influence on what I do today and who I am," Kamala said.

Cracking down on teenage prostitution

As a teenager, Kamala moved to Montreal, Canada, where she attended middle school and high school after her mother got a teaching job at McGill University and a position as a cancer researcher at Jewish General Hospital.

Both girls pursued careers in law, with Kamala attending Howard University, the prestigious historically African-American college in Washington DC, where she majored in political science and economics, before attending law school in San Francisco.

She began a career as a deputy public prosecutor in the early 1990s and was briefly in a relationship with politician Willie Brow,n who later became San Francisco mayor.

Incidentally, this week, Brown, who is 30 years older, wrote in an opinion article for The San Francisco Chronicle that the vice-presidency is a “dead end” and “not the job she should go for” - asking her to shoot for the attorney general's job instead.

Indeed, she had made her name in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office by cracking down on teenage prostitution in the city and reorienting law enforcement’s approach to focus on the girls as victims rather than as criminals.

Sustained grilling of Trump officials

In 2003, Kamala made her first run for public office, taking on her boss Terence Hallinan. When she was elected in a run-off with 56.5 percent of the vote, she became the first woman of Black/South Asian descent to be elected in California as district attorney.

Then followed seven years as San Francisco district attorney and six years as California’s attorney general before her election to the Senate in 2016.

Prior to that election, on Aug 22, 2014, just shy of her 50th birthday, Kamala married attorney Douglas Emhoff. The couple does not have children together, but Kamala is stepmother to Emhoff's two children from a previous marriage.

Her senate triumph occurred in November 2016, when she defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 senate election to succeed the outgoing Barbara Boxer. In doing so she became California's third female senator, the second African-American woman and the first South Asian-American to serve in the United States Senate.

As a senator, Kamala attracted attention for her sustained grilling of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including US attorneys general Jeff Sessions and William Barr, and associate justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

She also backed progressive causes such as healthcare reform, federal decriminalisation of cannabis, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a ban on assault weapons and progressive tax reform.

In lighter moments, she teamed up with actress Mindy Kaling to release a heartwarming video where they cook south Indian dishes like masala thosai, swapping stories about their immigrant mothers and bonding over how their parents both reused Taster's Choice jars to store Indian spices.

Propelled into the national spotlight, Kamala herself was briefly a contender for the US presidency, but was one of a wave of respected candidates who pulled out as a two-horse race developed between former vice-president Biden and Bernie Sanders, the standard-bearer of the party's progressive wing.

At 55, she's now viewed as a 'new generation' candidate to the older Biden, 77, and appealing to both the female and minority vote banks, as the pair prepare to take on incumbent Donald Trump, 74, and Vice-President Mike Pence, 61.

If she emerges victorious at the US presidential election on Nov 3, Kamala, a daughter of immigrant parents, would be a heartbeat away from the most powerful seat in the world's most powerful country.

And given that Biden has indicated that he may not be seeking a second term should he be elected president, Kamala would be the frontrunner in the 2024 US presidential race. - Mkini

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