Strangely, Kamala Harris’ big inspiration was her grandfather P.V. Gopalan who worked for the British Imperial administration service in India. A loyal bureaucrat who didn’t seem to have a single rebellious bone in his body. Maybe Kamala simply wanted to avoid drawing too much attention to her parents who met in a radical student organization whose members were instrumental in setting up the Black Panther Party which had a hardcore Maoist revolutionary line.
Gopalans daughter Shyamala could have studied in the rigid, traditionalist and cold Britain, yet she chose sunny California in the United States where all kinds of radicals met under the guise of a civil rights movement.
Shyamala wore Indian clothing and was sometimes mistaken for some kind of princess. Somehow she ended up in an African-American group where she met Donald J. Harris who had been born in Jamaica, another former British colony. This was her first real relationship and they soon got married. One of their daughters is Kamala, who spent her formative teenage and young adult years in Canada. The current monarch of Canada is King Charles III. As the living embodiment of the Crown, the sovereign is regarded as the personification of the Canadian state.
In the 20th century Britain ended the traditional imperialist structures, but tried to maintain a strong intelligence presence in the former colonies. The USSR used the opportunities presented by the newly “independent” countries to increase KGB activisties. What’s worse, Britain has had some secret relationship with the Soviets through aristocrats like Lord Louis Mountbatten. In February 1947, Mountbatten was appointed Viceroy and Governor-General of India and botched the Partition of India into India and Pakistan. Intelligence services in and outside of Britain suspected him of being a Soviet asset or collaborator.
In the early 20th century Britain already launched its own socialist movement through the Fabians and the London School of Economics. The Labour party is more or less the tool of the Privy Council.
Shyamala Gopalan stood in line to register for classes in Berkeley in the fall of 1959, while the person standing behind her was Cedric Robinson, a Black teenager from Oakland. He was part of the Afro-American Association at Berkeley and later became a professor. His best-known book, “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition,” is the blueprint for the new generation of a black intelligentsia. Just like Marx, Robinson spends 95% of his writings criticizing the status quo and the past. The decendents of slaves and post-colonial people of color were supposed to be united under a common ideology. Robinson (like Marx) does not care to explain how a revolution is supposed to work and what happens afterwards. If African-Americans took over a fraction of the US and turned it into a state, who would be a factory worker and who the privileged administrator? What woud the new government do with unhappy citizens demanding change? How would they be their onw thing and not a satellite of the USSR dictatorship?
Robinson’s book, just like Karl Marx’ work, only serves to create chaos and get the ball rolling, presumably to Moscow’s benefit.
In the fall of 1962, at a meeting of the Afro-American Association at Berkeley, Shyamala Gopalan met a graduate student in economics from Jamaica, Donald J. Harris, who was that day’s speaker. In 1963, they were married without following the convention of introducing Harris to Shyamala’s parents beforehand or having the ceremony in her hometown.
The founding member of the Afro-American Association was Donald Warden who mentored Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966.
In 1969, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, described the party as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” It was clear to every security professional that an literal army of fighters could one day overwhelm the police capacity of the US. The FBI sabotaged the party with an illegal and covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO).
Harris told a roomful of Black students, that he had grown up observing British colonial power in Jamaica, the way a small number of whites had cultivated a “native Black elite” in order to mask extreme social inequality. Of course he himself turned out to be a rather privileged and well-connected man.
In 1960, 17 African nations gained independence. The same year, Fidel Castro was received with open arms in Harlem, where he met with Malcolm X, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India. In 1963 and 1964, five members of the African American group joined a trip to Cuba organized by the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba, in defiance of a State Department travel ban, to see how Afro Cubans lived under Fidel Castro’s government.
Donald J. Harris attended the University College of the West Indies before earning a Bachelor’s degree from the University of London and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He served in Jamaica, at various times, as economic policy consultant to the government and as economic adviser to successive prime ministers.
Harris’s ancestor was probably Christiana Brown, who descended from Irish-born plantation owner Hamilton Brown. Brown was awarded a payment under the Slave Compensation Act 1837 as a former slave owner in the aftermath of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The British Government took out a huge loan with interest from Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore which was subsequently paid off by the British taxpayers.
At various times Donald J. Harris was even a visiting fellow in Cambridge University and Delhi School of Economics; and visiting professor at Yale University. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil in 1990 and 1991, and in Mexico in 1992.
Kamala’s grandfather PV Gopalan joined the Imperial Secretariat Service during British rule in India. He served as Under Secretary to the government of India in the Ministry of Transport. In the 1950s, he was posted as a senior commercial officer in Bombay. He worked on the rehabilitation of refugees from East Pakistan in India.
Rising through the ranks, Gopalan was later empanelled and served as Joint Secretary to Government of India in the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Rehabilitation. He was later deputed to the government of Zambia and lived in Lusaka as Director of Relief Measures and Refugees in 1966 during the Zimbabwean War of Independence, to help Zambia manage an influx of refugees from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
British Spying in India
https://brill.com/display/serial/BCPI
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/7378
Colonial Sinews of Postcolonial Espionage – India and the Making of Ghana’s External Intelligence Agency, 1958-61
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07075332.2021.1888768#abstract
‘A Serious Menace to Security’: British Intelligence, V. K. Krishna Menon and the Indian High Commission in London, 1947–52
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2010.503397
