Suhas Subramanyam once had little interest in politics. As a college student, he turned down an invitation to campaign for presidential candidates and even skipped voting. A career in public service was hardly on his mind.
Two decades later, Subramanyam, the son of immigrants from Bengaluru and Chennai, has won a second term in the US Congress. He retained his seat representing Virginia’s 10th Congressional District with around 63 per cent of the vote, extending a political journey that has taken him from Barack Obama’s White House to the US House of Representatives.
The turning point came in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, where Subramanyam was studying at Tulane University. He had initially planned to follow his parents into medicine. But after the storm forced him to return temporarily to Houston, he began volunteering with community organisations when he went back to New Orleans, helping rebuild neighbourhoods damaged by the disaster.
The experience changed how he viewed public service.
“I didn’t care about politics as much at the time. It really wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina hit the city and I got involved in community activism that I realized politics is important,” he said in an interview.
From Houston to the White House
Subramanyam was born in Houston on 26 September 1986. His mother, originally from Bengaluru, moved to the US in 1979 to join his father, who grew up in Chennai and Secunderabad.
After graduating from Tulane in 2008, Subramanyam studied law at Northwestern University. He went on to work with the office of Florida Congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas and the Senate Judiciary Committee.
His career took him to the White House, where he served as a technology policy adviser under then President Barack Obama between 2015 and 2017.
He subsequently entered electoral politics in Virginia, winning a seat in the state’s House of Delegates in 2019 before moving to its Senate in 2023. In November 2024, he became the first Indian-American elected to represent Virginia in the US Congress.
In his 2026 re-election campaign, Subramanyam put affordability and the protection of federal jobs at the centre of his pitch to voters. He criticised the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce, opposed tariffs that he said were driving up costs, and called for greater oversight of immigration enforcement. He also backed tighter rules for data centres, a particularly significant issue in Northern Virginia, home to a large concentration of such facilities. In a candidate questionnaire, he summed up his priorities as lowering costs, tackling corruption and opposing what he called “forever wars”.
Away from politics, Subramanyam has also volunteered as a firefighter and emergency medical technician in Loudoun County. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Miranda, and their two daughters.
A family divided by politics
There is another detail that offers a glimpse into the political differences within his family. In an interview with Roll Call, Subramanyam recalled that his mother was a Democrat while his father was a Republican. His father has since switched sides.
“My mom won that fight,” he joked.
From a college student who once passed up opportunities to get involved in politics to a two-term Congressman, Subramanyam’s journey has been shaped by an experience that changed his understanding of public service, the effort to rebuild a city after disaster.
(Edited By Raunaq Lekhi)