Will Ambassador Garcetti address the serious threats to India’s security from the Taliban and the CCP, or will he follow Ambassador Rahm Emanuel and push a radical transgender ideology via USAID grants, while posting cheerful videos about the marvels of Indian cuisine?
Since arriving in New Delhi on 24 March 2023, US Ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti has launched a lively Twitter feed, posting about Gujarati street food, dinner with Shahrukh Khan in Mumbai, sharing a video from a Tamil bistro in New Delhi set to a jazz pop soundtrack, where he described eating off a banana leaf with his hands, saying, “They say the best way to someone’s heart is through their stomach, so Chennai, today you’ve got my heart.” While it is encouraging to see the new US envoy expressing enthusiasm for Indian culture and cuisine, Ambassador Garcetti also needs to address weightier strategic and policy matters between India and the United States.
Garcetti has pledged to address the backlog of US visas applications by Indian citizens, and the slowdown in green card processing for Indians residing in the US. On 8 June 2023, the new envoy posted: “This summer, we’re on track to process the highest number of Indian student visa applications in the history of this Mission. Go Team Consular!” It remains to be seen if the Biden State Department will honour this pledge, as for many years Chinese nationals have far outnumbered Indian students at US universities. When Biden was Obama’s Vice President, US Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, Gary Locke tweeted about his success in quadrupling visas for Chinese applicants, as visas for Indian citizens sharply declined.
In an interview with the Hindu on 15 June 2023, Garcetti said of the US-India relationship: “It’s deeper than partners. Sometimes, partners sounds too clinical and we’re really friends in times of need. We have been there now every single time in recent years India needed us.” Yet Ambassador Garcetti has yet to address the security crisis sweeping South Asia after the Biden administration’s disastrous pullout from Kabul in August 2021, gifting the Taliban over $50 billion in US weaponry and Bagram airbase. Garcetti has yet to hold a press conference about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) incursions into Indian sovereign territory from Occupied Tibet, or the CCP’s mission to destabilize India by infiltrating Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Myanmar.
On 1 June 2023, Garcetti posted a video hoisting the Pride Flag at the US Embassy, with the caption “Today we raise the Progress Flag, a symbol of inclusivity, acceptance & celebration of diversity.” This sparked a backlash on social media across Asia, as many noted that no US Ambassador would think of flying a Pride Flag in Saudi Arabia or Iran. However, India being a democracy, conservatives shrugged off the gesture. Rahm Emanuel, Biden’s ambassador to Japan, offended Japanese politicians and diplomats by publicly attacking the Japanese government for not prioritizing LGBTQ issues. Since taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration has aggressively pushed transgenderism, especially on children, with government funded Drag Queen Story Hour programs in kindergarten, graphic pornography in elementary school curricula, executive orders pushing sex change surgeries for minors. Biden’s transgender Director of Health & Human Services, Dr Rachel Levine (aka Richard Levine) renamed women “birthing persons” and “chest feeders” while asserting that men can get pregnant.
On 10 June 2023, President Biden caused national outrage by hanging the Pride flag in the centre of the White House portico, in violation of the US code, as transgender guests posed topless on the White House lawn. US corporations pushing DEI—“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”—with Pride merchandise have lost $50 billion in market value in the wake of consumer backlash. Students in deep blue states are revolting against LGBTQ indoctrination forced by some school administrators, and on 14 June, a Michigan city with an all-Muslim government banned Pride flags in public spaces. Gay rights activist Bruce Bawer wrote in the New York Post: “Pride Month isn’t just about gays anymore. It’s about the whole ‘LGBTQI+’ crowd—a ‘community’ most gays never asked to join and whose guiding ideology makes most of us scratch our heads in confusion. And all of it—driven as it is by a radical rejection of objective truth—is a threat to everything we refer to when we speak of civilization.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in March 2023 that “LGBTQ+ rights are a core part of our foreign policy.” Prof Victor David Hanson noted: “Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first. The woke Left has now weaponized the country’s diplomatic missions abroad to advance highly partisan and controversial agendas that can offend their hosts, and do not represent the majority of American voters at home.” Former Democratic US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii posted: “Today’s Democratic Party undermines families, takes away parental rights, sexualizes our children, maims/poisons children with ‘gender-oriented care’ and normalizes pedophilia. We must stop this madness before it is too late.”
In my years working in Nepal, the poorest nation in South Asia, I saw USAID cash pouring into Kathmandu, along with strident young women who had never learned a word of Nepali conducting “gender empowerment trainings”—note the exclusion of the word “women”—warming things up for “birthing people” and “chest feeders.” Millions of US dollars went to waste, because it diverted resources away from the real crisis wreaking havoc on Nepal: the CCP’s Maoist insurgency, which broke Nepal’s economy, forcing millions of young men to seek jobs in Gulf states, and millions of defenceless Nepali women into prostitution. (USAID spent $787 million on “gender studies” programs at Kabul University before capitulating to the Taliban, and the Biden State Department has allocated nearly USD 1 billion in USAID funding for LGBTQ projects abroad).
But USAID ignored the catastrophic Maoist insurgency while droning on about “gender equity.” A Nepali friend told me, “Please tell your State Department this is embarrassing. 70% of our people don’t have enough food, don’t have work, and don’t need a lecture on Marxist gender theory when they’ve been murdered, raped, and traumatized by Maoist guerrillas.”
Will Ambassador Garcetti plan to address the serious threats to India’s security from the Taliban and the CCP, or will he follow Amb Rahm Emanuel and push a radical transgender ideology via USAID grants, while posting cheerful videos about the marvels of Indian cuisine? India is the world’s oldest civilization and deserves respect and admiration from its Quad partners. The new envoy needs to make sure during his stay in Roosevelt House that the US-India relationship deepens and broadens, and this can best happen when he switches from seeking to foist the values of a fringe in his party onto a democracy of 1.4 billion people, a civilisation that has maintained its ethos and traditions despite a millennium of external meddling and occupation.
- Maura Moynihan is a New York based journalist and author, specialising in the Chinese Communist occupation of Tibet. Her website is: mauramoynihan.net.