The maternal uncle of Kamala Harris says his phone hasn’t stopped ringing since Saturday when Harris shattered barriers to become the first woman Vice President-elect of United States.
A resident of Delhi’s Malviya Nagar, Gopalan Balachandran, 80, told Indian Express that he has been glued to the television set since four days, watching the race to the critical 270 electoral votes that decided the fate of Joe Biden and Harris.
“I am very proud of Kamala, I will call and congratulate her soon… My phone hasn’t stopped ringing since the news came out,” said Balachandran, who is the brother of Harris’s mother Shyamala Gopalan.
He will now be leaving for the US along with the rest of Harris’s family to attend her swearing-in ceremony in January 2021. “My daughter is already there, helping Kamala with her campaign. All of us will fly down… I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” the report quoted him as saying.
Harris, who will be the highest-ranking woman in US history, took the stage in Wilmington, Delaware on Sunday in a white suit in honour of the women’s suffragist movement to the sounds of Mary J. Blige.
In a symbolism-heavy victory speech, she told girls she would not be the last. Introducing President-elect Joe Biden in an optimism-fueled outdoor rally, Harris — also the first Black woman and Indian-American as vice president — sported a white suit in recognition of the suffragist movement that fought to give US women the vote a century ago.
“While I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last,” she said to cheers and honks from the crowd gathered in socially distanced cars. “Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
Harris vowed to fight to “root out systematic racism” but, like Biden, made a broad appeal to unity, saying that Americans “have elected a president who represents the best in us.”
Harris also paid tribute to her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who emigrated from India when she was 19 and died in 2009. “Maybe she didn’t quite imagine this moment,” Harris said. “But she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible.”
“So I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women — Black Women, Asian, White, Latina, and Native American women throughout our nation’s history who have paved the way for this moment tonight.”
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