- Thursday, June 05, 2025
The US second lady said for their next India trip they would try to get to the parts of the country “where my family is from”
By: India Weekly
US second lady Usha Vance has termed the India-US relationship “very personal” for her and described her visit to India in April as the “trip of a lifetime” for the family.
“I have family members who are in India, and I have many family members here in the United States,” she said during a fireside chat at the eighth edition of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) Leadership Summit in Washington on Monday (2).
The USISPF is an independent not-for-profit institution focused on strengthening the US-India partnership.
She was responding to a question about her personal perspective on the US-India relationship during the fireside chat conducted by USISPF chairman John Chambers.
Vance said, “The United States and India – 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 right now, I think, 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,” she said.
Vance recalled that when the second family – vice president J D Vance, herself and their three young children, visited India in April, “I was struck by the number of people who came up to me to say how much they loved our country.”
The Vances were in India from April 21-24 and met prime minister Narendra Modi in Delhi before traveling to Jaipur and Agra.
Usha Vance emphasized that meeting the Modi “was really very special.”
“We’d actually had a chance to meet him before,” she said adding that when her kids, who were sleep-deprived when travelling in Paris, saw the prime minister, they “saw an Indian man with a white beard and white hair, and they just put him in the grandfather category immediately. So they are very into him.
“They just love him. And he really cemented his status by giving our five-year-old a birthday present that day,” she said.
Vance further said that her children had never been to India before because of the pandemic and her husband’s political schedules but they have grown up knowing “so much about this country, the stories, the food, the relationships with grandparents and friends, but they had never actually seen it. So it was just sort of mind-blowing from their perspective.”
Noting that for her and her husband, “it just could not have been any more special” as the family had the opportunity to see some of the greatest sights in northern India.
“We’re looking forward to our next trip and trying to get to the parts of the country where my family is from as well,” she said, referring to Andhra Pradesh where her parents Krish Chilukuri and Lakshmi Chilukuri are from.
At the leadership summit, the USISPF also presented the 2025 Global Leadership Awards to IBM Chairman Arvind Krishna, Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla and Hitachi Executive Chairman Toshiaki Higashihara “for their outstanding contributions in strengthening the US-India-Japan economic partnership.”
This is the first time that business leaders from the QUAD grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the US will be honored at the USISPF summit. (PTI)
