Biden’s Choice
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
After months of dithering and indecision, Democrat nominee Biden finally settled on Kamala Harris as his running mate. There is no palpable chemistry between the duo. The choice represents the extent to which hypocrisy pervades democracy.
While running as a Presidential contender, Kamala failed to click and her opinion poll numbers dipped catastrophically to 3 percent by the time she dropped out on December 3, 2019. But before that, during the debate stage among those vying for the Democratic nomination, she garnered public attention (and scrutiny) by the abrasive manner in which she went after the benign Biden and humiliated him, in effect, calling him an ally of segregationists. Biden was visibly shaken by this onslaught from a supposed friend of his late son, Beau Biden.
Kamala is a beneficiary of the Me Too and the BLM upsurge, which has roiled American society and polity. She is much more Indian than black, despite the fact that her father was Jamaican. Through her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, she has Tamil roots in South India. Historically, south India has been downtrodden by north India.
In her autobiography, “The Truths We Hold,” Kamala falsely claimed that her grandfather, P V Gopalan, took part in the independence struggle against the British Raj when, in fact, he was a civil servant, a point emphasized by Kamala’s uncle, G Balachandran, in India.
With her acerbic tongue and mixed record on civil rights as Attorney General in California, Kamala didn’t clearly check all the requisite boxes that would have made her an immediate Veep choice.
But Biden had gotten himself prematurely boxed in by publicly announcing on March 15 that he would pick a woman. Presumably, he got spooked by the unsubstantiated sexual assault allegations leveled in the same month of March by his former staffer, Tara Reade, prominently magnified by the media, against the backdrop of the Me Too movement.
Trump has wasted no time in taking Kamala to the cleaners, particularly highlighting her public impertinence toward Biden.
Her selection does represent a milestone moment for Indian-Americans, who are delighted that one of their own has made it. Many Indians in America are infected by the virus of Islamophobia. They find Modi’s anti-Muslim venom appealing.
During the 1990s, Indian-Americans were not even on the radar screen. Now, they are embedded in the US mainstream with a seat at the table. South Indians get more space in the US than in India itself.
But what about Muslims? Lacking unity of purpose, they remain limited by low goals and misguided mentoring from elders.
The presidential debates shall visibly unveil the scale of Washington’s slump.
The post-World War II period of US ascendancy is history. Foreseeably, some of the damage done by the triple crisscross of Corona, BLM, and floundering economy may be irreversible. Exacerbating the above has been the proximity of elections in a now sharply polarized nation.
By attacking Kamala at the outset, Trump has telegraphed that Elections 2020 is going to be a particularly bruising affair, rife with personalized attacks. The BBC reported on August 17 that 56% of Democrats polled said that they support Biden because he is not Trump, and only 19% are swayed by his leadership.
The takeaway message here is that nice men may go to Heaven, but they are not necessarily viewed as the best fit for the big prize.
