Diaspora Reads

  1. “Years before [Kamala] Harris was even born, [her mother Shyamala] Gopalan was breaking through her own barriers,” writes Rikha Sharma Rani, in a piece about the Shyamala Gopalan, mother to the first woman of colour to become a candidate for vice president on a major party ticket in the US. “Her attitude was “This is who I am,” says Lenore Pomerance, one of Gopalan’s lifelong friends, who met her in 1961. It’s a mentality that seems to have followed Harris from her childhood in Berkeley to the cusp of entering the White House. “Don’t let people tell you who you are,” Gopalan told her. “You tell them who you are.”
  2. Karishma Mehrotra writes about how US President Donald Trump is peeling away some Indian-Americans from the Democrats, in part because of the connect the Republican side has with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
  3. Savita Patel reports on how Indian-Americans are using their own ‘bhasha’ to woo voters ahea do the elections on November 3.
  4. Texas has for decades been a solidly Republican state. Yet polls have suggested it is in the mix for Democrats this time around, with Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer writing about how the 160,000 Indian-Americans are at the core of Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s hopes for the state.
  5. Indians are familiar with ‘WhatsApp university’ and misinformation spreading through the messaging app. Now the WhatsApp-spread fake news has reached the US especially among the Indian-American community, writes Paresh Dave, where the Democrats are concerned it might affect turnout and the outcome.
  6. In Texas, Democratic Candidate Sri Preston Kulkarni seems like the obvious choice for progressives, Democrats and Indian-American supporters of Joe Biden. Yet, as Rashmee Kumar writes, “Kulkarni’s attendance last year at a rally headlined by India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump, in addition to allegations that his political career was launched with the aid of individuals ideologically connected to Hindu extremist groups in India, have cracked open deep-seated political divisions among Muslim and Hindu communities that were largely unified around his 2018 campaign.”
  7. Lavina Melwani speaks to Maju Verghese, the chief operating officer of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign whose life story is “a classic American tale of immigrants” – from Kerala – “succeeding against the odds.”
  8. “Indians and Pakistanis are often seen as being at loggerheads because of strained relations between their respective countries,” writes Vineet Khare. “But in the US, the two communities are part of the same South Asian diaspora and often work together during political campaigns.”

What you missed on Scroll Global this week