Vivek Ramaswamy: From India origins to Trump's cost-cutting ally

Washington, DC — He is a son of Indian immigrants and a Brahmin, the highest caste in the rigid Hindu hierarchy. He is impressed by Indian far-right PM Narendra Modi. And, he has actively allied with Hindu supremacist groups in America.

Meet the 39-year-old entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy, who along with tech billionaire Elon Musk, has been picked by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the newly established "Department of Government Efficiency" (or DOGE), an outside group that will advise the White House on government efficiency and cost cutting.

Trump has said little about how this group would function, but Musk has previously set an ambitious goal of cutting $2 trillion of government spending. It could come under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which dictates how external groups that advise the government must operate and be accountable to the public.

Federal employees are generally required to disclose their assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest, and to divest significant holdings relating to their work. Because Musk and Ramaswamy would not be formal federal workers, they would not face those requirements or ethical limitations.

Ramaswamy, who founded pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, has worked with the Food and Drug Administration, an agency he has previously called "corrupt". On social media site X in 2023, he claimed that "Countless FDA regulations and actions are hypocritical, harmful & unconstitutional."

Immediately after Trump's announcement, Ramaswamy took to his colleague Musk’s X to promote his new career in "cost cutting".

"Over the last 2 years, the Supreme Court has ruled that the administrative state is behaving in wildly unlawful ways. But slapping the bureaucracy on the wrist won’t solve the problem, the only right answer is a massive downsizing," he wrote.

From Kerala to cost cutting

A Republican presidential candidate until he dropped out of the presidential race in January, Ramaswamy, the multi-millionaire former biotech executive, gained fame in far-right circles thanks to his 2021 bestseller "Woke, Inc.," which decries decisions by some big companies to base business strategy around social-justice and climate-crisis concerns.

In the same book, he claims that a "lower-caste guy" in India can now deliver Domino’s pizza and "my family tips him to show their appreciation", crediting "American-style capitalism" for the change even as lowered-caste people in India continue to suffer from what has been dubbed as India's "hidden apartheid".

The caste system is a deep-rooted part of India’s culture. Dating back 3,000 years, it can be used to dictate someone’s job, the education and opportunities they receive and their dietary requirements. Whatever caste one is born into is the one they will stay in until the day they die. They cannot marry out of it.

The Brahmins (priests), such as Ramaswamy and his family, are at the top, nestled comfortably and followed by the Kshatriyas (rulers and soldiers) and the Vaishyas (merchants and traders). The Shudras (labourers and artisans) are at the bottom. And the Dalits (meaning oppressed or crushed) are out of the system, deemed so low that they are called the “untouchables” – and they make up some 20 percent of the population.

Ramaswamy's story begins in Kerala, a state in southern India that his parents left for the US in the 1970s. He was born in August 1985, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to V Ganapathy Ramaswamy, an engineer-turned-patent lawyer, and Geetha Ramaswamy, a psychiatrist.

The next decades saw him become a junior tennis player, Harvard and Yale graduate, hedge fund worker and founder of a pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences.

Ramaswamy's transition from biotech to politics came in 2021, when he wrote "Woke, Inc.," to slam corporate America’s focus on environment, social and governance issues. In 2022, he founded Strive Asset Management, an "anti-woke" investment firm. One of the backers of the firm was JD Vance, a law school friend of Ramaswamy who is now the US vice president-elect.

With a net worth of over $1 billion, Ramaswamy finally rose to political fame in 2023, when he declared his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination. Ramaswamy briefly threatened Republican primaries but after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses in January 2024, he ultimately suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.

Views on anti-racism

However, during his campaign and despite being the son of immigrants, he made several controversial and divisive promises. He advocates for deporting all undocumented immigrants "universally" and admit "darn close to zero" refugees fleeing persecution, war or natural disaster.

During the campaign trail, he also vowed to lay off thousands of federal workers by shutting down the FBI, the Department of Education and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"A strain of animus toward Black Americans runs through much of Ramaswamy’s public commentary," the New Yorker magazine wrote in the 2022 profile of Ramaswamy. BLM should stand for "Big Lavish Mansions," he told the magazine.

A year later, he compared Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass), who is black, to a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Ramaswamy came under intense criticism when he cited the 2023 murder of three black Americans in Florida by a white man as a consequence of anti-racism. He said he was "genuinely worried that we’re seeing a new wave of anti-black and anti-Hispanic racism as a consequence of the so-called anti-racist movements."

The Nation, a progressive American monthly magazine, noted the remarks on anti-racism or anti-racism movements "make clear that Ramaswamy belongs to a particular political niche: the person of colour who gains prominence by avowing an anti-anti-racist ideology that is gratifying to right-wing voters."

During the campaign, Ramaswamy sustained his appeasement of white supremacists and evangelists, praising Indian premier Modi’s Hindu nationalism in India — where minority and poor Muslims often face demolition of their homes and businesses, blood-curdling hate speeches, curbs in religious freedoms and mob lynching — and calling for its American equivalent.

He has kept ties with Hindu supremacist groups in the United States including VHP of America. The group is the US branch of India’s Vishwa Hindu Parishad (or VHP), which the CIA previously classified as a "militant religious organisation" for its involvement in acts of violence against minority groups, especially Muslims. The VHP in India has called for Muslims to be banned from office. Recently, it along with other Hindu extremist groups, called for an embargo of Christian and Muslim businesses. According to a US State Department report. VHP’s American chapter has said it shares the VHP’s values.

On Palestine, he is, like many American neo-conservatives and hawks, pro-occupation. In an event hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition in October 2023, Ramaswamy made the case for expulsion of all Palestinians from occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza to the Muslim countries.

Exhorting Israel to abandon the "myth" of the two-state solution — aligning with the policy of the current Israeli regime — Ramaswamy said Palestinians could be absorbed by neighbouring Arab states instead.

While Ramaswamy is a political newcomer and has no previous government experience, he along with Musk, are expected to face intense scrutiny over how they will handle the new job.