U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has falsely claimed that her grandfather was a freedom fighterin the Indian independence movement.
The Democratic presidential nominee shared on Sept. 8 a picture of herself in India with her maternal grandfather P.V. Gopalan. She described him as a “retired civil servant who had been part of the movement to win India’s independence.” Gopalan’s daughter Shyamala is the mother of the incumbent vice president.
Harris has previously described Gopalan, a Tamil from the elite Brahmin caste, as “one of the original independence fighters in India.” Gopalan purportedly was among the many who pushed back against British rule, which ended in 1946 shortly after the conclusion of World War II.
But news reports in India, quoting official records, have disproved the vice president’s claims. In one instance, the Times of India pointed out that Gopalan – born in 1911 – was a diligent civil servant. Harris’ uncle and Gopalan’s son G. Balachandran even told the outlet that he would have been fired if his father openly advocated ending British rule.
The U.S. vice president also received a strong rebuke on social media. The official X account of the Hindu People’s Party wrote that Gopalan worked in the British Imperial Secretariat Service in the 1930s, “a role off-limits to anyone tied to the struggle against British rule.” It added that “if anything, he aided colonial exploitation by serving the imperial bureaucracy.”
Defense analyst Abhijit Iyer-Mitra meanwhile decried Harris as a “liar” for parroting false claimsabout her grandfather. He continued: “How could a serving bureaucrat be part of the [Indian] independence movement opposing the same government and violating service rules?”
According to the National Pulse, Harris “has downplayed her Indian heritage in recent years, instead emphasizing the Black identity she inherited from her father.” The vice president’s father, Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris, is a Jamaican-American of mixed African and European descent.
Harris linked to slavery on her father’s side of the family
But on the side of her father, the incumbent vice president reportedly has a notorious slave owner from Ireland as an ancestor. The Gateway Pundit reported on this connection, citing research done by British historian Stephen McCracken.
According to McCracken, Harris’ four-times-paternal-great-grandfather, Hamilton Brown, was born in Ireland’s County Antrim in 1776. Brown’s birth year coincided with America declaring its independence from the British.
Brown relocated to Jamaica, which at the time was a British colony, where he became an ardent slave owner on the sugar plantations that made the fortitude of the island’s economy. He opposed the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1832 and even went back to County Antrim to replace his slaves with workers from his native country.
McCracken investigated her roots after discovering her ancestry in County Antrim through Brown. He nevertheless described the slave owner as a “notorious figure and not nice fellow.”
(Related: VP Kamala Harris a descendant of notorious Irish slave owner in Jamaica.)
“Hamilton was born in Antrim … before he moved to Jamaica as a teenager. That’s where he became a bookmaker, and then a plantation owner, and therefore a slave owner. His gravestone is in Saint Ann in Jamaica, which lists his birthplace as Antrim,” the historian stated.
“He had numerous slaves, in fact, Hamilton Brown routinely traveled back and forth to London to protest the abolishment of slavery. He would come back to Ireland to take migrants back to Jamaica to work once slavery was abolished. A quote refers to him as ‘making slaves of migrants’ in Ireland.”
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