America keeps trying to squeeze Usha Vance into a box that was never made for her. Democrats write long, anguished essays about how a vegetarian Hindu who once clerked for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court must be dying inside next to MAGA. The extreme-right online crowd crop her out of photographs, call her "the diversity hire", or mutter that a "pagan" now lives in the official residence of the Vice President (that residence, for Indian readers, is the elegant old Naval Observatory mansion in Washington DC - roughly the American equivalent of 7 Lok Kalyan Marg for the number-two leader.) Both camps are wasting their breath. The woman they want to rescue or expel has spent her whole life quietly doing things her own way.
She grew up Usha Chilukuri in the orderly San Diego suburb of Rancho Peñasquitos, daughter of Telugu academics from Andhra Pradesh. Vegetarian home, Ganesh Chaturthi pujas, parents who treated anything below Stanford as gentle failure. She played clarinet in the marching band, led the school history club, graduated Yale summa cum laude in history, picked up a master's at Cambridge on a Gates scholarship, then returned to Yale Law. Somewhere along the way, she took one of those silly internet quizzes, discovered she was an "Order Muppet", posted the result on Facebook, and accidentally gave the world the most accurate nickname she will ever have. That nickname explains why she and JD Vance made sense. They met in 2010 in Amy Chua's small section at Yale Law. Professor Chua paired the tattooed Marine veteran from the Ohio rust belt with the professor's daughter from San Diego to co-lead a reading group on working-class decline. Chua later laughed that they were opposites in every dimension except raw intelligence and terrifying ambition.
'Thank You For Saving Me'
JD fell first and hardest. In Hillbilly Elegy, he is almost painfully honest about it. Before Usha, his romantic history had been "a wreckage of bad decisions and worse breakups". On their first proper date he talked for hours about addiction, screaming matches, and children who had never seen a stable home. She listened without flinching, then emailed him a ten-page memo analysing the sociology of Scots-Irish family breakdown. He proposed within months, convinced she would eventually realise she could do better. He still ends every anniversary card the same way: "Thank you for saving me." He credits her with teaching him which fork to use at New Haven faculty dinners, and how to stop himself leaping out of the car in road-rage fury. Without her, he writes, there is no law degree, no bestseller, no Senate seat, no Vice Presidency.
Politics arrived like a storm neither of them invited. She was a registered Democrat until roughly the year they married. Old friends remember her calling January 6, 2021 "deeply disturbing" and Trump's behaviour that day "reprehensible" - language her husband himself had used in 2016 when he labelled Trump "America's Hitler" and voted for Evan McMullin. Yet, when JD performed his now-famous pirouette and embraced Trump, Usha did not stage a public crisis. The day after Trump picked him for VP in July 2024, she simply resigned from her elite California law firm. No press release. Her name and photograph vanished from the website overnight. Since then, she has spoken only when protocol demands it. Her four-minute convention speech introducing JD was warm, self-deprecating and completely free of ideology. She has worn Kanjeevaram silk to state dinners and Levi's to Ohio county fairs. She prepped JD for the vice-presidential debate against Tim Walz and, by all accounts, outworked the entire team. When a Fox interviewer asked what she hoped to accomplish as Second Lady, she smiled and said, "Honestly, I would just like to be a normal person for my kids."
Usha Isn't Performing
The noise around her is deafening and revealing. Nick Fuentes spent inauguration week asking why America has a "pagan" in the Vice President's official home. JD fed the fire at Ole Miss in early 2025 when he told a chanting Christian crowd he hoped one day Usha would accept the Gospel. He walked it back within hours, insisting she has no plans to convert, but the clip is immortal. Liberal columnists keep publishing tear-stained think-pieces about the prisoner in the mansion. Everyone is performing. She is not. What she actually is, friends say, is a cultural Hindu for whom dharma is duty and restraint rather than public piety.
She encouraged JD's 2019 conversion to Catholicism because she thought it would heal something in him, not because she intended to follow. Their three children go to Catholic school and light Diwali lamps with their parents. She attends Mass every Sunday and sits quietly through the creed. The marriage works, people close to them insist, because partnership comes first and ideology second. That marriage is now one heartbeat from the presidency. Betting markets and Republican operatives assume JD will coast to the 2028 nomination. If the economy sours or culture wars overheat, Gavin Newsom could still win. But if JD Vance becomes President in January 2029, Usha becomes First Lady, and India-US relations will change texture in ways no previous administration could have imagined.
The family felt the first hint of that change in April 2025 during a four-day official visit to Delhi. JD, Usha and their three children - Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel - arrived in kurtas and anarkalis, greeted by a tri-services guard of honour. They toured Akshardham Temple, rode elephants at Amber Fort in Jaipur, and stood before the Taj Mahal at sunset. At Prime Minister Modi's residence, the meeting turned warmly personal. Modi gifted the children peacock feathers - symbols of grace and protection in Hindu tradition - and a cart of Alphonso mangoes because it was Vivek's birthday week. The children hugged Modi goodbye like a favourite uncle. Behind the smiles, JD and Modi discussed a bilateral trade package designed to head off Donald Trump's threatened tariffs, quietly laying groundwork for deeper economic and strategic ties.
Unprecedented Times
That trip was only a preview. A 'President' Vance with a proudly Hindu wife would transform the relationship from transactional to instinctive. No occupant of the White House has spoken Telugu at breakfast, kept a small Ganesha on the mantel, or had cousins in Hyderabad who can ring the private line. With Trump not the loudest voice in the room, the old haggling over H-1B visas and tariffs can give way to genuine trust. Shared standards on AI governance and semiconductor supply chains. Joint naval exercises in the Indo-Pacific without the ritual American lectures on human rights and Kashmir. Diwali receptions in the White House Rose Garden attended by founders from both Silicon Valley and Bengaluru. Quiet phone calls from aunts in Chennai smoothing supply-chain hiccups during the monsoon season. For India, still sensitive to echoes of colonial condescension, this matters a lot.
An American First Lady who understands why peacock feathers are auspicious, who can recite a shloka over filter coffee with the ambassador, signals equality rather than patronage. It is soft power woven into family fabric. She has spent her life translating between worlds: California meritocracy and Appalachian trauma, Hindu restraint and Catholic grace, Supreme Court clerkships and Trump rallies. Silence, for her, is not absence. It is strategy.
If Usha's husband reaches the White House, India will inherit - without spending an extra rupee on K Street lobbyists - one of the most intuitive, high-level bridges it has ever had to America. She will probably still give fewer than ten interviews in four years. But then, the quietest voice in the room is sometimes the most powerful.
(Vikram Zutshi is a cultural critic, author and filmmaker who divides his time between the US, Latin America and Asia.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
