Not just Kamala Harris but US president-elect Joe Biden also has some old links with India. In 2013, when Biden made a maiden visit to Mumbai, he said, "I may have relatives in India". He reiterated his claim two years later in Washington, saying there are five Bidens residing in Mumbai.
When Biden became Senator in 1972 from Delaware, he received a letter from someone by the last name "Biden'' only. At that time, he learned that his "great, great, great, great, great grandfather" had worked in the East India Company.
And, during his Mumbai visit in 2013, he spoke about that letter. In his address to the Bombay Stock Exchange on July 24, 2013, Joe Biden narrated his story of the ''Biden from Mumbai''.
"It's an honour to be back in India and to be here in Mumbai. Off script for a second here, I was reminded I was elected to the United States Senate when I was a 29-year-old kid back in 1972, and one of the first letters, I received and I regret I never followed up on it," Biden said in his speech at the BSE.
"Maybe, some genealogist in audience can follow up for me, but I received a letter from a gentleman named Biden - Biden, my name - from Mumbai, asserting that we were related," Joe Biden added.
Biden claimed, his "great, great, great, great, great grandfather" George Biden was a Captain in the East India Trading company and after retirement, decided to settle in India and married an Indian woman.
Biden had also said someone provided him with the details including the phone numbers of the Bidens in Mumbai. He had informed the audience that he was yet to call his Mumbai relatives but was planning to do so.
In 2015, Biden told his audience in Washington "There are five Bidens in Mumbai, India," at an event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of India-US civil nuclear deal. However, it is not clear if Joe Biden did manage to contact them.
Biden defeated incumbent US President Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. The 77-year-old will take oath as the 46th US president in January 2021. Biden, at the age of 29, became the sixth youngest senator in American history when he was elected from Delaware in 1972.
Biden was re-elected to the Senate six times. He served as Barack Obama's vice president after they won the 2008 presidential election; Obama and Biden were reelected in 2012.
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