Kamala Harris, Usha Vance and the Limits of Identity Politics

We can’t celebrate their success as Indian-American women without looking at the underlying caste and race dynamics.

Kamala Harris and Usha Vance.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

I moved to the US as a student eight years ago, a few weeks before Trump became president in November 2016. If you'd told me then that by 2024 I would see an election with desi women on both sides of the ballot, I would have laughed in your face.

Regardless of how the US election goes in November, one outcome is guaranteed — there will be an Indian-American woman in the top echelons of power, either as Commander-in-Chief or Second Lady. Between Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Usha Vance, Republican vice-presidential (VP) nominee JD Vance’s spouse, desi women are on both sides of the ticket. That a demographic only comprising 1.5 percent of the US population is taking up such space is even more remarkable. 

This is historic in a country where only three out of 46 Presidents over two and a half centuries have not been White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). Though of course, all 46 have been men.

At one level Harris and Vance symbolise the ascendance of women of colour in American politics. At another, they are the epitome of an elite, upper-caste Indian-American diaspora that wields outsized capital and influence in the US. Both things are true at the same time. 

These women are creating history by taking up political space in a country that has denied it to people with their skin. But they are also riding on generations of upward mobility and privilege only granted to a narrow slice of the Indian population, and accepted by the US in the guise of the ‘model minority’.

We can be proud of their unprecedented accomplishments, while also interrogating how the Indian diaspora in the US came to be and how its overwhelmingly upper-caste nature limits grounded discourse about ‘Indian’ identity.

Blazing a Trail in US Politics

Harris’ heritage has been extensively covered since her VP nomination in 2020. Her mother, Shyamala, moved to the US in 1958, seven years before the 1965 Immigration Act flung open the doors for high-skilled immigration, eventually leading to the 4.4 million-strong community of Indian-Americans. In 1958 however, there were only 12,000 Indians in the US.

Shyamala, a trailblazer in her own right, pushed norms governing women’s agency in India at the time — she moved to the US by herself, married a Jamaican economist, and raised her mixed-race daughters to be in touch with their African, Caribbean and Indian heritages. Harris herself attended Howard, a ‘historically black college,’ and became San Francisco’s first person-of-colour district attorney in 2002.  

Usha Vance née Chilukuri’s background is more ‘typical’ in the Indian-American diaspora. Her father is an aerospace engineer from IIT Madras and her mother is a biologist. They moved to the US in the 1980s as part of the post-1965 immigration boom and are now academics in California. Vance’s accomplishments at Yale and Cambridge further cement her model minority credentials. 

On the campaign trail though, both Harris and Vance’s accomplishments appear to have taken a backseat behind their identities as brown women. While Harris has been called a ‘DEI hire’ and a ‘childless cat lady,’ Vance has faced racist slander from her husband’s voter base with white supremacists questioning what her skin colour means for JD’s immigration policies.

Harris’ Democratic inclinations are in line with her demographic. Indian Americans have historically voted Democrat. However, Vance’s embrace of the far-right is counterintuitive. Vance was registered as a Democrat till 2014 and has worked at a progressive law firm. Watching her speak at the Republican National Convention last month felt dissonant. Here was a daughter of Indian immigrants and a pedigreed lawyer on a platform that had called for abortion bans and mass deportations. 

The most plausible explanation lies in opportunism. In the last eight years, JD has gone from being one of Trump’s most vocal Republican critics to his running mates. Usha too is part of an overwhelmingly upper-caste and increasingly right-wing Indian-American diaspora, which has opportunistically whitewashed itself or superficially aligned with the rhetoric of civil rights, without interrogating casteism within the community.

At the Republican National Convention, Usha Vance introduced her husband by sharing an anecdote about him learning to cook vegetarian food for her family. She was trying to be funny and cute, but instead, she was embracing a caricature of what it means to be Indian. The ‘vegetarian Indian’ stereotype is embedded in an exclusively upper caste understanding of the identity. In the caricature, non-vegetarian Indians are exceptions to the rule, even as three-fourths of the country eats meat. 

Vance is able to embrace Trumpism because his ideology is only a hop, skip, and jump from casteism. It presumes one’s own superiority as natural and withholds empathy from swathes of people. 

‘Twice-born, Thrice Selected’

Over 80 percent of the Indian diaspora in the US identifies as upper-caste, compared to less than 30 percent of people living in India. By virtue of being one of the richest communities in the world’s richest country, the Indian-American diaspora also has a disproportionate influence on how ‘Indians’ are perceived, yielding monolithic caricatures of vegetarian Hindu technology workers. 

Shruti Rajagopalan’s recent piece delves into the caste structure of the diaspora across waves of immigration. Rajagopalan refers to work by Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh in their book “The Other One Percent: Indians in America,” to describe how caste and education moderates migration to the US. 

Shyamala Harris hailed from a Tamil Brahmin family while Usha Vance’s family likely belongs to the Telugu Kamma caste, a prosperous land-owning community. But their families were not just ‘twice-born.’

They arrived in the US not as blue-collar workers, but as highly educated and pedigreed academics and engineers. They were ‘thrice-selected’ — their high caste status gave them access to education, their education enabled admission to India’s elite technical institutions, and their technical skills were specifically selected by the US immigration system. 

This has led to an overwhelmingly upper caste and Hindu diaspora that relies on the illegibility of caste abroad to portray the Indian community as homogenous and oppressed by virtue of being a non-white community in a white society. This strategy has allowed it to wield the card of ‘Hinduphobia’ to deflect any criticism, intentionally conflating critiques of the community or political disagreement with Hindutva, with an attack on the Hindu faith. 

However, evidence of the persistence and entrenchment of caste in the diaspora continues to emerge. In 2020, California sued Cisco for caste-based discrimination when a Dalit engineer was harassed by his two upper-caste managers. The lawsuit noted that one of the managers knew the engineer from IIT and told their team that he’d been admitted through reservations.

The case is a textbook example of the networks of caste-based privilege borne out in these ‘technical’ domains as described by Ajantha Subramanian in her 2019 book “The Caste of Merit.” Instead of engaging with these concerns, conservative ‘advocacy’ organisations like the Hindu American Foundation have begun to spread the concept of “critical caste theory,” borrowing explicitly from white nationalist campaigns against “critical race theory.”

Racism and Casteism

The commonality in rhetoric exemplifies how closely casteism is related to racism. Isabel Wilkerson brought this idea to the American mainstream in her 2020 book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It contends that race and caste similarly use social stratification to enforce systemic inequalities. Just as upper castes maintain dominance over lower castes, racial hierarchies in the US enable white supremacy to sustain systemic discrimination against people of colour. This thesis builds on decades of intellectual connections between Dalit and Black activists, starting from correspondences between Dr BR Ambedkar and WEB DuBois.

That casteism, where complexion is a marker of status, predisposes itself to racism, is evident throughout this election. Harris’ blackness has prevented parts of the diaspora from giving her full-throated support. Like Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, Vance has positioned herself as part of the ‘model minority’ to gain approval from her husband’s white supremacist voter base.

One op-ed in the Wall Street Journal simply ran with the headline: “J.D. Vance and the Indian-American Dream: This immigrant group has prospered without quotas or grievances.” Conservatives have also been going to lengths to highlight the ‘compatibility’ between Hinduism and Judeo-Christian values, with Vivek Ramaswamy regularly professing his Hindu faith and Christian values.  

Indians have historically voted for the Democratic Party, but support is declining. 84 percent voted for Obama in the 2008 election, but as of 2022, only 68 percent supported Democrats. An increasingly confident diaspora, bolstered by a new wave of desi Republicans, is beginning to move right-ward, into the fold of the anti-immigration MAGA movement. 

There has also been increasing bipartisan support for Hindu nationalism through groups operating in the US and sending funds to India. The Hindu American PAC and Republican Hindu Coalition are funnelling thousands of dollars to candidates to platform largely concocted issues like Hinduphobia attitudes and offer tacit support to Hindu nationalist activities in the US. A recent report by Savera highlighted the links between the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s American wing and the white far-right. That an upper-caste diaspora is bringing the largely upper-caste project of Hindutva overseas is no surprise.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Thus, Harris and Vance bring us to the limits of identity politics -- how are we to understand two women who are pushing the frontiers of women’s representation in American politics, while also riding on the coattails of generations of caste privilege, and now standing on two opposite ends of the political spectrum?

Their representation signals to all women of colour in the US that the presidential glass ceiling is weakening, if not at the brink of breaking. But their commonalities also hold up a mirror to the Indian-American community’s blindness to its own casteism. 

So this November, when a desi woman rises to the top of the US political establishment, I hope we don’t just celebrate, but also think long and hard about how they got there — and where they will take us.

(The author is a joint masters student at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)