Nikki Haley
Nimarata Nikki Haley (née Randhawa; born January 20, 1972) is an American politician who served as the 116th governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017. She was the 29th United States ambassador to the United Nations for two years, from January 2017 through December 2018. She is the first Indian American to serve as a member of a presidential cabinet.
She was a candidate in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries. Her victory in the Washington, D.C. primary on March 3, 2024 made her the first woman ever to win a Republican Party presidential primary contest.
Haley was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, and studied accounting at Clemson University. Haley joined her family's clothing business, before serving as treasurer and president of the National Association of Women Business Owners. First elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 2004, she served three terms. In 2010, during her third term, she was elected governor of South Carolina and won re-election in 2014. Haley was the first female governor of South Carolina, the youngest governor in the country and the second governor of Indian descent (after fellow Republican Bobby Jindal of Louisiana). She was the first Asian-American female governor, and in 2017 became the first Indian-American in a presidential cabinet.
Haley served in President Donald Trump's Cabinet as United States ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a 96–4 vote, and was sworn in on January 25, 2017. She affirmed the United States's willingness to use military force in response to further North Korean missile tests in the wake of the 2017–2018 North Korea crisis. She strongly defended Israel at the Security Council and led the effort to withdraw the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council. She voluntarily stepped down on December 31, 2018.
Arvind Kejriwal
Arvind Kejriwal (born 16 August 1968) is an Indian politician and a former bureaucrat. He served as the 7th Chief Minister of Delhi. He was the chief minister from 2013 to 2014 and from 2015 to 2024. He was also the Chief Minister of Delhi from December 2013 to February 2014, stepping down after 49 days of assuming power. Currently, he is the national convener of the Aam Aadmi Party, which won the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections with a historic majority, obtaining 67 out of 70 assembly seats.
In 2006, Kejriwal was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership in recognition of his involvement in the grassroots level movement Parivartan using right to information legislation in a campaign against government corruption. The same year, after resigning from Government service, he donated his Magsaysay award money as a corpus fund to found the Public Cause Research Foundation, a non-governmental organisation (NGO).
Before joining politics, Kejriwal had worked in the Indian Revenue Service as a Joint Commissioner of Income Tax in New Delhi. Kejriwal is a graduate in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. In 2012, he launched the Aam Aadmi Party, which won in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election. Following the election, he took office as the Chief Minister of Delhi on 28 December 2013. He resigned 49 days later, on 14 February 2014, stating he did so because of his minority government's inability to pass his proposed anti-corruption legislation due to a lack of support from other political parties. On 14 February 2015, he was sworn in as Chief Minister for a second term after his party's victory in the Delhi Legislative Assembly election.
He was arrested in March 2024 by the Enforcement Directorate on allegations of a Delhi liquor scam against Aam Aadmi Party's Delhi Government. He became the first ever incumbent chief minister within India to be arrested. On 13 September 2024, he was granted bail by Supreme Court.
His party was defeated in the 2025 Delhi Legislative Assembly election, losing his seat to Parvesh Verma by a margin of over 4,000 votes from the New Delhi Assembly constituency.