From the Times of India Nov. 29:
Huma Abedin, who is now 32, is the only daughter of parents of pre-partition India. Her father Syed Zainul Abedin was an alumnus of Aligarh Muslim University and came to the United States for graduate studies. He worked at the Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where Huma was born to his wife Saleha, a Pakistani who also came to the United States for graduate studies.
The couple left US for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when Huma was only 2, but she returned to Washington DC as a young woman, graduating from George Washington University. In 1996, she found placement as an intern in the White House, and was assigned to the First Lady’s office, where she was eventually hired as a staff assistant to Hillary’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams. For several years, she was the backup to Mrs Clinton’s permanent personal aide, Allison Stein, and she officially took over as Hillary’s aide during the 2000 Senate race.
Some stories have cast Huma as Hillary’s chief political aide and a future White House chief of staff. But the projection is clearly overblown and off-the-mark.
From all accounts, Huma is more of a "body person" a constant shadow who handles Hillary’s travel and appointment, although other Clinton supporters speak highly of her intellect and have predicted a bright political future for her. Her presidential campaign title is "traveling chief of staff". (Incidentally, the Clinton campaign’s policy director is also an Indian-American, Neera Tanden, who, like Hillary, is a graduate of Yale University) Huma’s organization talents are so great that she virtually runs the scheduling aspects of the Clinton campaign, although it is Neera who runs the think-tank. So cool and poised is she that the inside joke in the campaign is to figure out "whether Huma is human".
Predictably, it is Huma’s proximity – physical and otherwise – to Hillary Clinton that has fuelled vicious rumours among right-wingers of a lesbian relationship between the two. Much of that has been deduced from the mundane fact that Huma has picked up the phone at the candidate’s house at all odd hours.
But so toxic is the political atmosphere in the United States with almost a year of campaigning left in the presidential elections that it is a field day for rumours. Everything from Barack Obama’s "extremist connection" to Rudy Giuliani’s "mafia links" is fair game to bloggers.
Huma herself is under scrutiny now for her years in Saudi Arabia, and everything that her father wrote, including some tracts about communal violence and the Muslim minority in India, is being studied carefully.
