What a Kamala Harris Administration Would Mean for India

The politics of the United States have been upended in the past few weeks from the attempted assassination of Republican candidate Donald J. Trump to the sitting Democratic President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek another term. Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, has stepped into his shoes to run as her party’s candidate for the office of president of the United States.

What would her presidency mean for India?

Kamala Harris is half-Indian, born in California to a mother from Tamil Nadu and a father from Jamaica. Her parents met and married in the United States, before separating and getting divorced. Growing up, she visited her maternal family several times in Chennai, and apparently enjoys South Indian food such as dosas. Beyond this, it is unclear to what extent Harris has a strong cultural connection to India, let alone to the politics and geostrategic concerns of her mother’s homeland. Raised a Baptist Christian — her father’s religion — and married to a Jewish man, she has not spoken much about her Hindu heritage in public.

Throughout her adult career, she has been identified more with the Black community than the Indian American one. As her political career progressed — she served as a senator from California in the U.S. Senate before becoming vice president — Harris has done little to highlight her Indian heritage or support Indian causes. As vice president, she has not visited India. In short, despite her Indian heritage, Harris does not seem to bring to the India-U.S. relationship any special cultural connection, nuance, or attention.

What little she has said about India — a statement, for example, that was seen as sympathetic to Kashmir and critical of India after the revocation of Article 370, which suspended the autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, in 2019 — seems to have come from her background in progressive and leftist politics. She has met Prime Minister Narendra Modi — for the first time in 2021 — but the two seem to have little personal chemistry. Harris has not spoken in depth on issues of domestic or international importance to India, other than maintaining the Biden administration’s line on security issues in the Indo-Pacific: that the region should remain free and open, prosperous, and secure.

Some of this may also be a function of the fact that Harris has not yet developed a strong foreign policy portfolio. On the other hand, Biden did so for many years as the chairman or ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 12 years before becoming vice president; it was possible to speak of a “Biden Doctrine” long before he became president. Let alone visiting India as vice president, Harris has not visited China — arguably the most important country for any U.S. president to deal with — even once, and has met with Chinese President Xi Jinping only once, briefly. (On the other hand, her vice president candidate, Tim Walz, even lived and taught in China during his youth.)

The India-U.S. relationship, including all that it entails geostrategically for U.S. interests in Asia, has so far been handled by the foreign policy heavyweights in the Biden administration: Biden, himself, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

This is not to say that Harris has no foreign policy exposure: as a prominent politician, she was bound to get such experience. As vice president, she has supported the Biden administration’s positions on international conflicts as varied as Ukraine and Gaza, has met with 150 heads of state, chairs the National Space Council, and visited several Latin American, African, and Asian countries. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris pledged to strengthen U.S. global leadership, a vague statement that implies that she intends to stay the course of the Biden administration in regards to foreign policy: a liberal internationalism tempered by practical limitations, a view strengthened by her choice of policy advisers.

At the end of the day, it remains to be seen what Harris believes about foreign policy, and what a Harris foreign policy doctrine would look like beyond implementing the platform of her party and staying the course of her predecessor in pursuing a form of liberal internationalism.

Based on her career and record, it seems evident that Harris’s interests lie in domestic policy and reform, and that her main interest in foreign policy would be to keep the world from becoming too chaotic or unmanageable so as to impinge on her ability to focus on domestic issues.

Yet India need not worry too much about Harris’s lack of interest in Asian geopolitics or the political nuances of her mother’s homeland, mostly because a bipartisan consensus seems to have emerged in the United States that favors closer, stronger ties with India for a variety of reasons: geopolitical rivalry with China, economic and trade benefits, and an influential Indian American diaspora. There may be an uptake in some upbraiding on human rights issues, given the Democratic Party is more likely to emphasize some concerns, but ultimately, India-U.S. relations will likely continue as usual.

However, despite this, a Harris administration would be a bit of a disappointment for India. India would miss the detailed, policy-based, security-oriented interest that the Biden administration has shown it on the one hand; on the other hand, Harris would hardly show India the personalized, personality-driven indulgence that the country would receive from Donald Trump, a man who has a long history of positive chemistry with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.