Eric Garcetti: Biden’s Man In Delhi

AFTER A TWO-YEAR DELAY, India again has an envoy at the US embassy in New Delhi. Rather, the US has finally managed to get its man bound for India through the rigours of the Senate confirmation process. In part, the hold-up over Eric Garcetti’s appointment was only about President Joe Biden’s appointee. On the other hand, it was also about a bureaucratic and political pipeline that has kept in queue ambassado­rial nominees to over 20 countries, including Azerbaijan, the Bahamas, Barbados, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Ecuador, Guyana, etc. So, India was one among many waiting for its American ambassador. But with the exception of Saudi Arabia, it’s difficult to balance the India-US bilateral equation with what Washington enjoys with, say, Maldives, Montenegro, Niger, Papua New Guinea & Vanuatu, etc. That’s not to make little of these countries, but the vacuum in New Delhi was a slap in the face of every acknowledgement of the relationship between the US and India.

Garcetti is a man with interesting antecedents. His Italian paternal great-grandfather Massimo had migrated to Mexico and ended up being hanged during the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century. His grandfather Salvador and family crossed the border into the US and Salvador’s son Gilbert, or Gil, Eric’s father, would eventually become a Los Angeles district attorney in end-1992, the same year the city had been wrecked by the riots following the acquittal of police officers implicated in the brutal beating of Rodney King. Gil Garcetti’s office also prosecuted the OJ Simpson murder trial which resulted in the ex-footballer’s acquittal in 1995. Garcetti Sr won re-election nevertheless and focused on hate crime and LA’s street gangs, but then an LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) corruption scandal probably cost him a third term in the 2000 election.

Garcetti Jr inherited all of this long before becoming LA’s 42nd mayor in 2013, a Mexican- American who was also the city’s first Jewish mayor. Garcetti’s mother’s family, the Roths, were Jewish immigrants from the old Pale who had set up a clothing brand in the US. If one were looking for a fading American archetype, of an older idea of melting-pot America, here is one in the person of the new ambassador to India.

Nominated in July 2021, Garcetti’s appointment had been cleared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2022 but then two Republican Senators, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, later joined by former presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, placed separate holds on his nomination for allegedly overlooking allegations of sexual misconduct by Rick Jacobs, a close aide when Garcetti was mayor. According to the Senate report on the matter, “…more likely than not that Mayor Garcetti either had personal knowledge of the sexual harassment or should have been aware of it”. Garcetti, backed by the White House, consistently denied the allegations and Biden re-nominated him. Grassley felt the US owed India a “qualified ambassador” while Rubio called the nomination “absurd”. While it’s easy to put much of this down to the reportedly broken state of bipartisan politics exacerbated by the Trump era, the fact is that when Garcetti was finally confirmed with a 52-42 vote in the Senate, a few Democrats also voted against him.

But now that it’s done, the question is: Has Garcetti already run out of time, given that the end of Biden’s term is round the corner? The US is India’s biggest trading partner and nothing has changed in the bipartisan consensus on continuously building on the strategic partnership. But there is tricky terrain to navigate on the Ukraine war and Russia. There is difficult, if less contentious, ground to cover on China in both the Indo-Pacific and on the Himalayan border. The relationship was not on auto-pilot at all thanks to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. But every fresh envoy needs time to settle down, know the host country firsthand, and learn what not to say. And Garcetti has already made what could be seen as a faux pas by his comments on the Citizenship Amendment Act. That may ultimately be of no consequence, but the onus is on the Biden administration and its ambassador to shed the embarrassment caused more to the US than India by the two-year wait.

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Sudeep Paul

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