Indian Americans Are Excited For Harris. But Her Identity Is Not The Main Factor.

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. — Retired librarian Rajesh Agrawal first came to New Jersey from Uttar Pradesh, India, to attend Montclair State University with her husband in 1963. A widowed grandmother now living in the Indian American hub of Edison, New Jersey, she has lived a slice of the American dream, having raised two American daughters — one a pediatrician, the other a teacher.

For Agrawal, electing Vice President Kamala Devi Harris — whose mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was an Indian immigrant — as president would fulfill a longstanding wish.

“I always dreamed that one day an Indian will be the president of the country,” Agrawal said. “And it’s happening now!”

If Harris defeats former President Donald Trump on Tuesday, she will be the first woman president, the second Black president, the first South Asian American president, and the first Asian American president of any kind.

Perhaps because there are still only 4.4 million Indian Americans in the country, of whom 2.1 million are eligible to vote, the community’s response to Harris’ nomination has elicited limited attention.

Their response has been positive. Harris is the choice of the overwhelming majority of Indian American voters, according to polls; many Indian Americans are celebrating the opportunity to have one of their own in the White House.

But even Harris’ Indian American supporters emphasize that their support for her candidacy is rooted, first and foremost, in policy, not identity. And Harris’ historic status as the first Indian American vice president has not been enough to overcome divergent partisan allegiances and ideological views within the Indian American community.

Karan Virmani, the chief financial officer of a logistics company and a co-chair of the New Jersey chapter of South Asian Americans for Harris, said Harris’ nomination had inspired his 15-year-old daughter to become more active in politics. She recently helped lead a push to make Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, a school holiday in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. “She didn’t think she could” affect politics, Virmani said. “Now she believes she can. She believes her voice is important.”

Similarly, Radhika Sharma, a technology worker and co-chair of the South Asian American Caucus of the New Jersey Democratic State Committee, has an “emotional response” when she sees Harris speak. “It is a sense of pride,” she said.

Sharma was quick to add though: “The crowd that I deal with, they’re very conscious not to get biased by just the fact that her heritage is common with ours. They still want to rate her or judge her based on her merit.”

Nina Agrawal, Rajesh’s pediatrician daughter, said Harris’ identity was a plus, but nothing more. “I really just want the best person for the job,” Agrawal, a Manhattan resident, said. “But I think it’s kind of cool that she is both Black and Indian. It’s a sign of the country changing.”

Sharma, Nina and Rajesh Agrawal, and Virmani were among the roughly 100 attendees at a canvass kickoff in a northern New Jersey park in mid-October. Organizers from as far away as California had flown in to help with the event, which was timed to coincide with an early celebration of Diwali, though the holiday officially took place on Thursday.

New Jersey is home to more than 430,000 Indian Americans, who make up nearly 5% of the state’s population — more than any other state in the country.

The Garden State is not in contention in the presidential race, and Democratic Rep. Andy Kim is the runaway favorite for an open U.S. Senate seat.

Those present at the event were mainly there to knock doors for Democrat Sue Altman, who is running to unseat Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R) in a northwestern New Jersey seat that is home to nearly 69,000 Asian Americans — 9% of the district’s population. The centerpiece of the event was an early Diwali ceremony in which Kim and Altman were both given the honor to light the diya (oil lamp) before delivering speeches about the stakes of their campaigns.

Polling data suggests Sharma’s view is common among Indian Americans. Just 23% of Indian Americans called Harris’ Indian identity “extremely” or “very” important to them, compared to 41% who said her identity as a woman is “extremely” or “very” important to them, according to a September NORC survey commissioned by the groups AAPI Data and APIA Vote.

Likewise, there is not much evidence that Republican Indian Americans are prepared to make an exception for Harris because of their shared Indian roots.

Indian Americans favor Harris over Trump 69% to 25%, according to the NORC poll. That suggests Harris is picking up some Indian American independents, since 55% of Indian Americans identify as Democrats or Democrat-leaning and 26% identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning.

Other data, however, actually show Harris losing ground with Indian Americans relative to President Joe Biden. Harris is on pace to receive 60% of the South Asian American vote compared to Biden’s 68%, according to an October survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

New Jersey state Sen. Vin Gopal (D), the first Indian American in New Jersey’s state Senate, pointed to two other reasons why Indian Americans might lean Democratic overall: the party’s support for educational opportunity and its defense of the United States’ democratic institutions.

“India is the world’s largest representative democracy,” said Gopal, who now chairs New Jersey’s Senate Democratic Conference.

The attendees at the South Asian American Caucus’ canvass kickoff in mid-October most often cited traditional liberal priorities when explaining their support for Harris, such as gun regulations, access to affordable health care and abortion rights.

In keeping with these overall policy preferences, Congress’ small but growing Samosa Caucus is made up entirely of Democrats: Reps. Ami Bera (Calif.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.) and Shri Thanedar (Mich.). Virginia state Sen. Suhas Subramanyam, the Democratic nominee in suburban northern Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, is expected to grow their ranks come Tuesday.

But Gopal does not expect Harris’ Indian heritage to nudge Indian American conservatives into her corner anymore than they moved him to consider the Republican presidential runs of former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — the country’s first Indian American governor — and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

“People’s political views and their world views are still where they’re going to be,” Gopal said.

Hartaj Singh, an Edison high school student whose father dropped him off at the Basking Ridge event along with platters of hot samosas from the family’s restaurant, said that in his predominantly Indian American school, he was one of the few proud Democrats.

“Ninety-five percent of it is like, ‘Trump is actually good for the economy,’” said Singh, who is fired up about the dangers that the Republican policy blueprint, Project 2025, poses to the country. “Then you pull out studies, and they’ll say, ‘My parents told me that.’”

Singh also said some classmates have questioned Harris’ status as an Indian American because her father is Jamaican and suggested instead that former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy is a “real example of an Indian.”

Singh’s experience speaks to the diversity of the Indian diaspora community in the United States — the regions of India they come from, the political parties with which their families are aligned in India, their religions and the types of work they have found in the United States.

In Sharma’s view, Indian American business people skew more conservative than their peers with highly credentialed jobs in the health care, technology and education sectors.

Sharma has also observed that some of the hardcore supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism are more likely to support Trump, a fellow nationalist who had a strong relationship with Modi.

“At least visibly, they’ve shown a lot of affinity toward each other,” she said of the two leaders.

Priti Pandya-Patel, founder and chair of the New Jersey GOP’s South Asian Coalition, used to own ambulatory health care facilities. She said she was drawn to the Republican message after growing fed up with how Democrats’ interventions in health care had diminished the quality of care she was able to provide.

Pandya-Patel, who now consults for health care companies, identifies as a moderate Republican who supports abortion rights. Her pitch to Indian American voters is instead that Republicans offer lower taxes and an end to illegal immigration.

“Would you think it’s fair that somebody else just can cross the border, come in, they get Social Security, they get all this? And you had to wait 10 years, 15 years, to come to this country legally?” she recalled saying to prospective converts to the Republican cause. (Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to receive Social Security benefits.)

Pandya-Patel also echoed what Singh had heard from his classmates about Harris lacking a strong Indian identity. “I have never even seen her wear Indian clothes or identify herself as Indian,” Pandya-Patel said.

There is at least one known photo of Harris as a young adult wearing a sari (traditional South Asian garment) while sitting with her sister and grandparents. And Harris, who is affiliated with a predominantly Black Baptist church in San Francisco, wore a garland around her neck at her 2014 wedding to Doug Emhoff — a nod to her Indian heritage.

Harris has not made her Indian American, Black American or female identities central to her presidential run.

But in Harris’ present campaign and over the course of her career, she has also not been shy about the importance of her Indian immigrant mother and her mother’s culture in shaping who she is.

In a moderated conversation at a summit convened by the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies in May, Harris recounted the story of her mother’s immigration to the United States to attend college and her memories of family visits to Chennai, India, every two years.

“Given who my grandfather was and about the fight for independence in India, my mother then … took to the streets to march for civil rights in her sari,” Harris said. “That’s how she met my father. And all of that has had a profound influence.”

In an op-ed out Saturday in The Juggernaut, a South Asian news outlet, Harris also recalled absorbing some of her grandfather’s progressive values while accompanying him and his fellow retired friends on their morning walks.

“My grandfather and his friends would passionately debate the importance of democracy and a government that treated people equally and with fairness … and a government that was not corrupt,” she said. “That influenced my life in more ways than I can ever explain, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.”

Gopal, whose family name reflects shared south Indian heritage with Harris, rejected the suggestion that Harris has downplayed her Indian heritage.

At the same time, he acknowledged that politicians like himself and Harris must sometimes balance emphasizing their personal background with speaking for constituencies where South Asian Americans are invariably a small minority.

“That’s up to each and every person,” he said.

Indeed, at the Oct. 13 canvass kickoff, the most impassioned remarks about Harris’ identity and the significance of her candidacy for Asian Americans of all backgrounds came from Kim, a Korean American, who wore a purple Indian kurta (long tunic) for the occasion.

“I just hope that we take a moment to recognize that this hasn’t always happened in the past, the ability for us to be able to mobilize the South Asian community, the Asian community, to be able to have Diwali events leading up to Election Day,” Kim said. “And this is a testament to the hard work that so many leaders here and across our state and across our country have put in over the years to be able to say, ‘We have a voice that cannot be ignored.’”

He went on to recount how a number of New Jersey Democrats told him during his first congressional run in 2018 that an Asian American could not win in a predominantly white district. And last year when Kim announced his Senate run, he said someone looked him in the eye and told him that he was “not the right kind of minority” to run statewide.

“How offensive is that?!” he exclaimed.

“This idea that I can only appeal to Asian Americans, that I’m not going to be able to win both to the Black community, the Latino community, the white population, or others — it shows just how much effort we need to move forward to be able to build upon what we have. And I want to tell you, one big way that we’re going to do that this year in New Jersey — we’re going to have a South Asian Black woman at the top of the ticket and an Asian American man running for Senate!” he declared, prompting cheers and applause from the crowd.