Indian-American running for lieutenant governor in Vermont

Monday, 29/02/2016

http://paper.hindustantimes.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

WASHINGTON: Watching the young African-American senator speak, Kesha Ram thought to herself that if there was a place for someone like him in politics, maybe there is place for someone like her.

That was 2006. Senator Barack Obama was stumping for Bernie Sanders, who was then running for Senate, and Ram, a young college student in Vermont, had just introduced them at an election rally. 

“That was the first time I had heard an American story like mine,” Ram said. “About having a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas and I have a father from India and a mother from Illinois.” 

Inspired by that encounter, Ram, a great-great granddaughter of Ganga Ram, the civil engineer who designed and built landmark institutions in colonial India and after whom Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital is named, plunged into politics. She interned on Capitol Hill the next summer, ran for the student body at her university and, at the age of 21, was elected to the state legislature in Vermont. 

Now 29, she is running for lieutenant governor. 

Ram belongs to a new generation of Indian-Americans, mostly those born here, who are actively seeking public office wherever they can — city councils, state legislatures and US Congress. 

When she first ran for office in 2008, she was called a “kitten with lipstick”, but now, as The Deerfield Valley New said in a recent article, “They don’t underestimate her anymore.” 

Her father Mukul Ram came to the US for higher studies in the late 1960s — engineering like his great-grandfather — at the University of California, Los Angeles, and stayed on. 

But not as an engineer. He discovered a talent in himself for cooking while still a student at UCLA, honed it by reading up books on Indian cuisine, and went into the restaurant business. 

He landed up running a pub, which has become a useful election prop for Ram. She likes to say at campaigns that she was “raised by an Indian immigrant father and Jewish-American mother at an Irish pub”. 

“I see the position as a connector-in-chief,” she said, who as her campaign website added will “bring together Vermonters from all corners of the state to solve our greatest challenges”. 

Ram’s agenda includes investing in early learning, affordable higher education (as does Sanders’, whose fan she has been for long), affordable homeownership and “affordable, quality broadband internet access”.