I’m not sure a presidential and vice-presidential candidate have ever observed the birthday of a Hindu god that’s half boy and half elephant, but this being 2020 — there’s a time for everything.
Ganesh is one of the most popular out of a huge pantheon of Hindu gods and you see his human body with an elephant head all over India. On his birthday, which was Aug. 22, Biden made a tweet, which was re-tweeted by his vice presidential nominee, as a greeting to his followers.
This from the India-based Economic Times:
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his Indian-origin running mate Kamala Harris on Saturday greeted the Hindu community in the US, India and around the world on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi.
"To everyone celebrating the Hindu festival of Ganesh Chaturthi in the US, India, and around the world, may you overcome all obstacles, be blessed with wisdom, and find a path toward new beginnings," Biden said in a tweet.
So why did Biden tweet this? Was this a nod to his vice presidential pick’s heritage? A move to win America’s tiny Hindu vote? A salute to India? You tell me.
The key, here at GetReligion, is where this side of the Democratic Party’s interfaith campaign is getting the news coverage that it deserves.
We’ve written about the whole Hindu angle before. For the record, Kamala Harris attends a Baptist church; her husband is Jewish and her mom was Hindu and she’s named after the Hindu goddess Lakshmi.
So … want some interesting reads on the heritage hook in the Kamala candidacy?
Readers will want to search out media from India. From TimesNowNews.com, there’s this look at a current Internet trend:
Hashtag #YoKamalaSoIndian trended on Twitter after it was reported that Harris once asked her aunt Sarala Gopalan in Chennai to break coconuts for good luck at a Hindu temple when she was in the fray for California attorney general election in 2010.
The aunt lined up 108 coconuts that were smashed. Harris won the election by a margin of 0.8 per cent.
This gave birth to the hashtag #YoKamalaSoIndian. Netizens are sharing memes and jokes about typical Indian behaviour. From putting sui dhaaga in to keeping an eye on the meter while travelling in an autorickshaw, people shared hilarious posts.
The Hindu, a newspaper headquartered in Chennai, near where Kamala’s family is from, has run numerous pieces on her, including this, written by a research fellow at George Mason University in northern Virginia.
It says in part, providing some crucial Indian culture background:
That’s not to say Harris’s Indian roots haven’t fundamentally shaped her. Her mother Shyamala Gopalan was born in India and raised in a Tamil Brahmin family, which likely afforded her the Indian equivalent of white privilege. Because of this Brahminical edge, families such as Shyamala’s (and mine), boast multiple generations of college graduates in a country that has yet to achieve 100 per cent basic literacy.
Not unusually for Tam-Bram families, Shyamala and all her siblings were encouraged to pursue advanced graduate degrees. In Shyamala’s case, this included a rare opportunity move to the US to attend Berkeley, creating the possibility of joining the Indian-American elite, or what scholars have dubbed The Other One Percent. This educational foundation in turn, would have helped ease Harris’s own entry into the ranks of the American elite.
The Wall Street Journal had an August 20 piece on this topic as well with this click-baity headline: “What Kamala Harris isn’t saying about her mother’s background.”
In her book, Ms. Harris airbrushes her mother’s community from her story. The words Tamil and Brahmin don’t appear at all. At one point the senator mentions that Gopalan won an award for her singing in India, but not that it was for Carnatic music, a classical art form closely associated with Tamil Brahmins.
At one level, this omission is understandable. The senator is a U.S. politician appealing to American voters. She has no obligation to know about her mother’s ancestral community, much less to recount its story.
But the Tamil Brahmin story also undercuts many of the pieties of the U.S. left. How do you characterize America as a land of oppression when so many immigrants have clearly experienced it as a land of opportunity?
Harris is no Tulsi Gabbard (a Hindu congresswoman from Hawaii), but one does wonder how much a part of her worldview is linked to her Hindu past. A personal note: The Lutherans on my father’s side of my family who emigrated from Germany a century ago have helped form my thinking even though I am not a Lutheran today. However, Harris is second generation whereas I am third generation and she’s had many more trips back to India than I’ve ever had to Germany.
Is the above tweet right in saying that those in India despise Kamala Harris more than love her ? (This YouTube video features two Indians who say there’s no way she’s one of them). Is Indian heritage (which comes with religious practice; India is a secular nation but, under its current regime, it’s hard to see a separation of temple and state) only part of her when she wants to make a point on diversity?
Normally I’d give a candidate like Harris a break on all this, figuring she’s just another child of immigrants who’s succeeded in a major way.
But wishing Ganesh a happy birthday? That could be an attempt to make a statement of some kind. I’m hoping some alert reporters dig into this side of the Harris story and figure out what that might be.