US Ambassador-Designate Eric Garcetti arrived in India on Tuesday night nearly two years after over two years after the then US envoy Kenneth Juster stepped down. Garcetti, was officially sworn in as the US Ambassador to India, nearly a month ago, on March 24 by US Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a twitter post, the US Embassy in India shared the news thus, “Namaste, Ambassador-Designate Eric Garcetti! We’re thrilled to welcome you to #IncredibleIndia and work with you to build even stronger ties between our two great nations.”
The Embassy has been without an ambassador since January 2021, one of the longest such stretch in the history of US-India relations. Juster, the last US envoy to New Delhi, stepped down in January 2021 after Biden became the US president.
Garcetti, considered a close aide of Biden, was nominated to the post of the Ambassador to India over two years ago. But the nomination was not confirmed by the Senate earlier following concerns by some lawmakers that Garcetti had not adequately handled allegations of sexual assault and harassment against one of his aides.
After serving 12 years as a Los Angeles city council member, Garcetti was elected as the 42nd Mayor of Los Angeles in 2013.
He was then the youngest mayor in Los Angeles history, and was re-elected in 2017 with the widest margin ever recorded in the city.
Garcetti has earlier travelled to India several times and spent a year in college to study Hindi and Urdu. He is coming to India at a time when India is holding G20 presidency and the US and China have locked horns over several issues. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues and the India-US relation in the given dynamics is also a concern.
Visa delays has been another matter of concern for those keen to travel to US from India. Incidentally, as per the US Embassy Twitter post, 400,000 visa applications have been processed as of April 10 and the Embassy tweeted that it is , “another milestone hit on our mission to process 1 million visas.”