Kamala Harris will be the first woman to be US vice-president

Kamala Harris, who traces her roots to India, will create a few firsts when she occupies the office of the US vice-president after AP and CNN called the US presidential election results in favour of Joe Biden of the Democrats. 

Biden had named Kamala Harris as his running mate. AP has called Pennsylvania with 20 electorate votes in Biden’s favour, taking his total tally to 273 against Donald Trump’s 214. 270 electorate votes are required to become the president.

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Harris, 56, whose mother hails from Tamil Nadu in India, will be the first woman to become the US president. She will also be the first Asian American and first Afro American woman to occupy the post. Her father hailed from Jamaica.

She is a senator from California and was San Francisco’s first female district attorney from 2004 to 2011. She was also the first coloured woman to be California’s attorney general, having occupied the chair from 2011 to 2017.

She contested the US senate elections in 2016 and became the first woman from South Asia to be elected to the Senate.

Her name became familiar during the Senate hearings of officials in the Trump administration in 2017 when she questioned attorney general William Barr and then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

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After being announced the vice-presidential candidate, Harris gave a shout-out to her “chithis” (aunts) and recalled her mother’s journey from Chennai to the US.

Harris was born on October 20, 1964, to economist Donald J Harris, who settled in the US after moving from Jamaica, and cancer biologist Shyamala Gopalan, who migrated from Tamil Nadu to the US. She is married to attorney Douglas Emhoff and has two children.