Indian American U.S. Second Lady Usha Vance says she and her husband, Vice President J.D. Vance both believe it’s a time of great opportunity for the bilateral ties between the United States and India.
Calling her relationship with India “very personal,” Vance recalled their recent trip to India where their three children struck a rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, putting him “in the grandfather category.”
“It is a very personal relationship because I have family members who are in India, and I have many family members who are in the U.S.,” she said during a fireside chat on the sidelines of the USISPF Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., Monday.
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“And I did grow up visiting India and visiting those family members, and they grew up visiting me. So that’s always been a relationship that I’ve personally thought of as very important,” she said, during an interaction with USISPF Chairman John Chambers. “More broadly, this is a time of great opportunity. And if my husband were here, he’d say the same thing,” she remarked.
“Obviously, the relationship has ebbed and flowed at times. There are times when one country’s needs and one country’s goals are different from the other. But in the next four years, and in the future, the fact that there is this established Indian-American population here and so many people in India who know the country and know the people who are here doing great things, having great opportunities, these personal ties actually have something to do with it,” she added.
Born in San Diego to Indian-born Telugu-speaking professors, her father Krish Chilukuri is an aerospace engineer from IIT-Madras while her mother Lakshmi is a marine biologist and now provost at one of the colleges in UC San Diego. The family moved to the U.S. in the 1980s.
Talking about her recent visit to India as the U.S. Second Lady, along with her husband and kids, she said, “I was struck by the number of people who came up to me to say how much they loved our country, how they visited family, how they visited just for pleasure, that they were hoping for a close relationship looking forward.”
Vance described the trip as “the trip of a lifetime” for her children, who had never set foot in India before. “They’d grown up hearing the stories about our family, the food, and the rich traditions, but to finally see it all in person was simply mind-blowing,” she recalled.
From savoring authentic Indian cuisine to marveling at iconic landmarks, every moment of the journey added a new layer to their understanding of the country’s heritage.
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One of the most memorable highlights of the trip was meeting Modi, an encounter that forged a remarkably personal connection. The Vance children, still sleep-deprived from earlier travels in Paris, instantly took a liking to Modi when they saw “an Indian man with a white beard and white hair,” as Usha described.
“From the moment we met him, our kids embraced him as their ‘grandfather’ figure,” she said.
Usha Vance emphasized that the productive conversations between Modi and her husband, J.D. Vance, not only reinforced diplomatic ties but also deepened personal bonds, something that she believes will bolster the future of U.S.-India relations.