Washington: Scientist and entrepreneur, Shiva Ayyadurai has become the fourth Indian-American to announce his bid as an independent candidate for the 2024 US presidential election. Announcing his campaign bid recently, the 59-year-old Mumbai-born  said he wants to serve America, beyond “Left” and “Right” to deliver solutions people need and deserve.

“I am running for President of the United States of America. We stand at the crossroads where we can either head into a Golden Age or into the Darkness... America becomes great when innovators, entrepreneurs, working people with skills and those committed to using common sense and reason run this country,” Ayyadurai said.

In his campaign bid, he said that the old guard of career politicians, political hacks, lawyer-lobbyists and academics who pervade the country and local government with corruption and crony capitalism stop America from becoming great.

Ayyadurai left India in 1970 and came to live the American dream along with his parents and settled in Paterson, New Jersey. “I left the caste system of India in 1970 where we were considered low caste ‘Untouchables’ and ‘Deplorables’,” he said on his campaign website.

Ayyadurai’s announcement comes close after Indian-American aerospace engineer Hirsh Vardhan Singh threw his hat in the ring for the Republican nomination after former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

A Fulbright Scholar with four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ayyadurai had expressed interest in taking up the position of Twitter’s chief executive officer last year. According to his campaign website, he has started seven hi-tech companies, including EchoMail, CytoSolve and Systems Health and “invented email” when he was just 14-years-old.

He is currently the Founder and CEO of CytoSolve, Inc, which is discovering cures for major diseases from pancreatic cancer to Alzheimer’s.

HIRSH VARDHAN SINGH

Earlier, aerospace engineer Hirsh Vardhan Singh became the third Indian-American vying for the Republican nomination for the 2024 US presidential race after former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Singh, 38, introduced himself as a lifelong Republican and an “America First constitutional carry and pro-life conservative who helped restore the conservative wing of New Jersey’s Republican Party starting in 2017” in a video message posted on Twitter. He ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 2020, and the present bid is the fourth time the defence and aerospace industry executive is eyeing public office.

According to Singh, Americans face grave threats from the corruption of both, big tech and big pharma, and in addition, there is an all out attack on American family values, parental rights and open debate. “While Big Pharma has made massive profits working with the government to compel everyone to take the experimental vaccines, Big Tech has become the Big Brother, who invades our privacy and indulges in censorship of our political and contrarian viewpoints,” she said in an over three-minute-long video.

“We need strong leadership to restore American values. That is why I have decided to seek the Republican Party’s nomination for the 2024 election,” he added. While praising fellow Republican candidate Donald Trump as the “greatest president of my lifetime”, Singh said that “America needs more”.

“It is time to move past outdated politicians of a bygone era,” Singh said, calling himself the “only pure blood candidate for the President” as he never gave in to the Covid vaccinations. “Even New Jersey’s Democrat Senate President labelled me as ‘Trump on steroids,” he said in his video message.

Singh joins a crowded list of Republican candidates vying for presidency, which includes Trump, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Ramaswamy, Haley, Senator Tim Scott and businessman and pastor Ryan Binkley.

According to a recent Morning Consult poll, 59 per cent of voters support Trump, 16 per cent would vote for DeSantis, 8 per cent to Ramaswamy, 6 per cent to Pence, and 2 per cent to Scott. Born to Indian immigrant parents, Singh is armed with a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2009.

Entering New Jersey politics in 2017 as a candidate for Governor, Singh finished third in the race, securing a meagre 9.8 per cent of the vote share. He was awarded Aviation Ambassador in 2003 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.