Shiva Ayyadurai Joins 2024 US Presidential Race

WASHINGTON, DC (IANS) – 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.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ayyadurai became known for a social media COVID-19 disinformation campaign, spreading conspiracy theories about the cause of COVID-19, promoting unfounded COVID-19 treatments, and campaigning to fire Anthony Fauci for allegedly being a deep state actor.

Ayyadurai garnered 3.39% of the vote as an independent candidate in the 2018 Senate election in Massachusetts, and also for the Republican Party in the 2020 race but lost to Kevin O’Connor in the primary. After the election, he promoted claims of election fraud that were shown to be false by fact-checkers.

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 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 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.

Ayyadurai was romantically connected with actor Fran Drescher at one point.