“As a fellow South Asian, Tamil, person, I’m deeply proud of her commitment to making the world a better place,” A.R. Rahman said. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

Music composer and singer A. R. Rahman endorsed U.S. Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris for the White House, as he led a concert for her. Ms. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher in California, was originally from Chennai (then Madras), from where Mr. Rahman hails.

The pre-recorded Sunday evening (October 13, 2024) concert was organized by the AAPI Victory Fund, a Super PAC (Political Activity Committee) that is backing Ms. Harris and other Asian American candidates.

Mr. Rahman sang various well-known songs, including Jai Ho [Be Victorious] from Slumdog Millionaire and ‘Singapenney’, which translates to ‘lioness’ from the Tamil movie called Bigil. He was accompanied by drummer Veeramani and sang duets, including with singer and voice actor Chinmayi Sripada.

“Her [Ms. Harris] interest in focusing on what unites us instead of what divides us is a message that is very important, not just for the United States but for the world,” Mr. Rahman said.

“As a fellow South Asian, Tamil, person, I’m deeply proud of her commitment to making the world a better place,” he said.

Ms. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was Indian and her father is Black, from Jamaica. In her book, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, Ms. Harris, who was mostly raised by her mother, says Ms. Gopalan and her relatives “instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots” and that Ms. Harris and her sister, Maya, were raised with “a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture”. She also says her mother knew that, in the U.S., they would be seen as “black” and therefore raised them to be “confident, proud black women”. 

Speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in July 2024, former U.S. President Donald Trump, who is fighting Ms. Harris for the Presidency, had questioned Ms. Harris’s racial identity by suggesting that she had leaned into her Indian identity relatively more, until recently. Ms. Harris had characterized Mr. Trump’s suggestion as an example of “the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect”.

During Sunday’s (October 13, 2024) concert, the founder of AAPI, India-born Shekhar Narasimhan, urged participants to get involved in the elections.

“You have to make a plan to vote. You have to volunteer in this campaign, and you have to donate,” said Shekhar Narasimhan, adding, “It’s called ‘tan man dhan’ [body, mind, wealth].”

Mr. Narasimhan said that 400,000 Indian America voters in seven ‘battleground states’ [i.e., Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina] could become the “margin of difference” between winning and losing the election, given the victory margins in these states in 2020.

U.S. President Joe Biden won six of these states, while Mr. Trump won one, North Carolina, in 2020.

Washington:

Donald Trump has never lacked for self-confidence, but his presidential campaign has been sent into a tailspin by the extraordinary events of the past month, and suddenly he appears older, more awkward and grasping for direction.

An assassination attempt, the shock withdrawal of Joe Biden from the White House race and replacement by his younger, high-energy vice president, Kamala Harris, all seem to have taken a toll on a candidate who — until recently — had seemed well on course for victory in November.

President Biden’s exit has been particularly impactful, removing a rival whose 81 years, faltering speech and physical frailties had largely shielded Trump from the scrutiny of his own age and weaknesses.

Now it is Trump, 78, who is the oldest presidential nominee in history, and the point of comparison is a 59-year-old former prosecutor who has come out fast and swinging.

Trump is “very upset” as he huddles with aides searching for a new campaign narrative, said Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017 before the two had a falling out.

“He’s now frightened, he’s now cornered, and he’s very angry,” Scaramucci told MSNBC.

‘Quit whining’

Trump’s campaign managers are reportedly desperate to have their candidate focus on issues that play with his base like immigration and inflation.

And while Trump does address those subjects at length during his long and often rambling public appearances, he repeatedly pivots to personal insults, questioning Harris’s intelligence, attacking her racial identity and branding her a “communist.”

Republicans including Nikki Haley, who Trump vanquished in the primaries but who has since endorsed him, say such attacks play badly with the undecided voters Trump needs to win.

“Quit whining about her,” Haley said on Fox News, while also urging Trump to stop obsessing over who draws the most people to their campaign rallies.

“The campaign is not gonna win talking about crowd sizes,” she said.

But Trump’s long list of grievances has only grown — “they’re not being nice to me,” he complained recently — as the momentum has shifted to Harris, erasing the poll leads Trump had in the swing states likely to decide the November election.

Sensing an opportunity, the Harris campaign has sought to amplify the image of Trump as withdrawn, angry and embittered.

“Donald Trump To Ramble Incoherently,” it said in a mock promotion for a Trump campaign event on Thursday that promised “another self-obsessed rant full of his own personal grievances.”

The Thursday event had been billed as a press conference focused on Trump’s economic agenda.

Standing in front of tables loaded with supermarket goods aimed at illustrating the household cost of inflation, Trump stayed on message at first — head down, reading out examples of product price rises that were listed in a binder.

But then he repeatedly veered off topic, talking about wind turbines that killed birds, going over crowd sizes again and peppering it all with derogatory personal remarks about Harris.

While politics of resentment can play well with his base, “it is less clear how Trump’s personal attacks against Harris will play with undecided swing voters,” political science professor Elizabeth Bennion of Indiana University told AFP.

“Some observers wondered whether Trump might exercise restraint when facing a multi-racial female candidate,” Bennion added. “The answer is clearly no.”

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)