Roving Periscope: Vivek Ramaswamy also to contest against Donald Trump in 2024

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: Former US President Donald Trump, who is likely to run for the President’s office in 2024, now has two Indian-American challengers, both from within his own Republican Party—Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

While Haley, 51, threw her hat in the ring last week, tech entrepreneur Ramaswamy, 37, launched his 2024 bid on Tuesday to enter the Republican Party’s presidential primary, challenging Trump’s efforts to seek a second season at the White House.

Ramaswamy’s parents migrated from Kerala to the United States and worked at a General Electric plant in Ohio.

Promising to “put merit back”, and end the USA’s dependence on China, Vivek made his announcement during a live interview on Fox News’s prime time show with Tucker Carlson, a conservative political commentator, the media reported on Wednesday.

Nimrat Randhawa, aka Nikki Haley, is a two-term former governor of South Carolina and ex-US Ambassador to the United Nations.

“We are in the middle of this national identity crisis, Tucker, where we have celebrated our differences for so long that we forgot all the ways we are really just the same as Americans bound by a common set of ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago,” Ramaswamy said.

Calling “wokeism” a national threat, he said: “That’s why I am proud to say tonight that I am running for the United States President to revive those ideals in this country.”

“I think we need to put ‘merit’ back into America in every spirit of our lives,” he said, adding he will end affirmative action in “every sphere of American life.”

A second-generation Indian-American, Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences in 2014 and led the largest biotech IPOs of 2015 and 2016, eventually culminating in successful clinical trials in multiple disease areas that led to FDA-approved products, the reports said.

He also founded other successful healthcare and technology companies, and in 2022, he launched Strive Asset Management, a new firm focused on restoring the voices of everyday citizens in the American economy by leading companies to focus on excellence over politics.

“I’m all for putting America first, but we have to first rediscover what America is. And to me, those are these basic rules of the road that set this nation into motion from meritocracy to free speech, to self-governance over aristocracy.

“The people whom we elect actually make them run the government rather than this cancerous federal bureaucracy. That’s gonna be the heart of my message.”

He said the US faces external threats like the rise of China.

It “has got to be our top foreign policy threat that we’ve gotta respond to, not pointless wars somewhere else.” “That’s gonna require some sacrifice. It’s gonna require a declaration of independence from China and complete decoupling. And that’s not gonna be easy. It’s gonna require some inconvenience,” he said.

Foreign policy is all about prioritization, he said.

“We gotta wake up to the fact that China is violating our sovereignty and the reason is if that had been a Russian spy balloon, we’d have shot it down instantly and ratcheted up sanctions. Why didn’t we do that for China?” he asked.

“The answer’s simple. We depend on them for our modern way of life. This economic co-dependent relationship has to end,” he said.

In a statement, Democratic National Committee chief Jaime Harrison said as Ramaswamy used Tucker Carlson’s show to announce his campaign for president, one thing is clear: The race for the Make America Great Again (MAGA) base is getting messier and more crowded by the day.

“Over the next few months, Republicans are guaranteed to take exceedingly extreme positions on everything from banning abortion to cutting Social Security and Medicare and we look forward to continuing to ensure every American knows just how extreme the MAGA agenda is,” Harrison said.

With India rising on the global horizons, Haley and Ramaswamy are not the only Indian-origin politicians trying to scale up the top echelons of power overseas.

According to the 2021 Indiaspora Government Leaders List, more than 200 leaders of Indian heritage have ascended to the highest offices of public service in 15 countries across the globe, with over 60 of them holding Cabinet positions.

With more than 32 million people of Indian origin (PIOs) globally, according to India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Indians are the largest diaspora population in the world.

Prominent Indian-origin politicians overseas include  Kamala Harris, who became the first woman and the first colored Vice President of the USA in 2021. A Democrat, she was a Senator for California (2017 to 2021) and also served as California’s Attorney-General (2011 to 2017). She was born to Indian and Jamaican parents in California.

In the crucial midterm elections in November, a record five Indian-American lawmakers from the ruling Democrat Party—Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, Ami Bera, and Shri Thanedar—were elected to the US House of Representatives.

Rishi Sunak became Britain’s first Indian-origin Prime Minister last year. He is the youngest British PM in 210 years. He is also Britain’s first Hindu PM. Goan-origin Suella Braverman is serving as his Home Secretary.

In Sunak’s predecessor Boris Johnson’s Cabinet, India-born Priti Patel was the Home Secretary, while Alok Sharma was the International Development Secretary in the Johnson Cabinet.

Other top Indian-origin politicians overseas include Eric Varadkar (Ireland’s Prime Minister), Antonio Costa (Portuguese Prime Minister since 2015), Anita Anand, Harjit Sajjan, and Kamal Khera (all ministers in Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s Cabinet), Priyanca Radhakrishnan (Minister in New Zealand), Christine Carla Kangaloo (President-elect of Trinidad and Tobago), Pritam Singh (served as Leader of the Opposition in Singapore since 2020), Devanand “Dave” Sharma (Member of the Australian Parliament, 2019), Mohamed Irfaan Ali (President of Guyana), Pravind Jugnaut (Prime Minister of Mauritius since January 2017), Prithvirajsing Roopun (President of Mauritius since 2019), Chandrikapersad “Chan” Santokhi (President of Suriname since 2020), and Wavel Ramkalawan (President of Seychelles since October 2020.