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Kamala means Lotus which rhymes with POTUS
In this letter, Girish Modi elaborates how Harris' Indian background is influencing her presidential campaign.
Dear editor,
The meme coconut tree as applicable to Presidential candidate Kamala Harris after Joe Biden’s graceful exit from the race is taken from her 2023 speech: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” is going viral on social media.
But for many Indians and Indian Americans, the line, which Harris attributed to her mother, is layered with extra meaning. Tamil Nadu, the South Indian state where her mother’s family is from, is one of India’s largest growers of coconut palms.
In Sanskrit, Kamala means ‘lotus.’ In America, it means POTUS — president of the United States. Coconuts have played another role in Harris’ life. When she was running for California attorney general, Harris asked an aunt who lived in Chennai to break coconuts at a Hindu temple for luck. Kamala Harris' "coconut tree" quote continues to take over social media.
Harris is the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father and grew up in California, but she shies away from her Indian heritage and deploys it strategically. In India, her sudden elevation to likely presidential has added to a general sense of pride in the country’s rise in global stature. While Harris maintains family ties in Tamil Nadu and has talked about her visits every other year to India as a child, she has not made any official trips to India as vice president, and before that had not visited since 2009.
Her candidacy resonates more in the Indian American community, even if Harris is seen as identifying more as Black than as Indian. Many Indian Americans see Harris as another example of the diasporas’ success and influence, including in politics, with growing numbers of Indian American lawmakers and candidates at the highest levels. (The five members of the House with Indian roots sometimes use the nickname “samosa caucus.”)
If she wins the White House, Harris seems unlikely to vastly reshape American ties to India. She does not share the same personal relationship with PM Modi that he was widely seen to have with her opponent in the presidential race, Donald Trump. But she would be likely to continue the Biden administration’s broad effort to bring India closer as a counterweight to China, foreign policy experts said.
Harris’ campaign could benefit financially from Indian Americans, who represent a little over 1% of the U.S. population but are among the wealthiest and most influential diaspora communities. In 2020, the community poured millions of dollars into the Biden Victory Fund, galvanized by Harris’ selection as Biden’s vice presidential pick.
In India, much of the focus on Harris’ candidacy has been about where she might take American foreign policy. If she is elected, it could do a lot to ease India’s long-standing suspicions of U.S. intentions in the region.
Modi had not hesitated to advertise his relationship with Trump when he was in the White House. In 2020, Modi laid out a grand welcome for Trump’s presidential visit to India, arranging for a massive crowd to greet him. The previous year, the two leaders shared the stage at an event in Texas called “Howdy, Modi!” Thousands of Indian Americans had gathered to cheer Modi’s election win that year.
Harris and Modi have displayed no such chemistry. If she wins in November, Harris will face a delicate task in navigating the relationship with Modi. She will have to balance “India’s record on human rights, her thinking on which has been pretty pronounced, and its growing role as a regional and aspirational power that provides an important counterweight to the common China threat.
Girish Modi
Decatur, GA
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