Donald Trump (L); Tulsi Gabbard.
Credit: Reuters Photos
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is preparing for an early engagement with United States President-elect Donald Trump’s team, including Tulsi Gabbard, who has been nominated to the new Director of National Intelligence and has been well known to several Sangh Parivar functionaries in India.
While Modi himself may bid adieu to outgoing US President Joe Biden with a brief interaction on the sideline of the G20 summit in Rio De Janeiro next week, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval are expected to reach out soon to the key members of the incoming administration in Washington DC, including their would-be counterparts Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz.
Trump nominated Gabbard as the new Director of National Intelligence. She had been raised as a Hindu and had taken oath on Bhagwad Gita after being elected to the US House of Representatives in January 2013. Two years after her unsuccessful bid to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for the US presidential elections, she had quit the party in 2022 and joined the Republican Party earlier this year.
Gabbard has deep connections with Indian American community in the US as well as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in India. She had gifted Modi a copy of Bhagwad Gita during her first meeting with him in New York soon after he had taken over as the prime minister in India. She had visited India for three weeks from December 2014 to January 2015, when she delivered a lecture at an event held by the India Foundation, led by the BJP leader Ram Madhav, in New Delhi. Madhav and India’s ambassador had attended her wedding ceremony, which was held according to Vedic rituals in Hawaii, in April 2015 and delivered her gifts from Modi – a pashmina shawl and a statuette of Lord Ganesha.
She had in the past supported India’s tough stance on the issue of cross-border terrorism coming out of Pakistan and defended India’s record on religious freedom despite criticism in the US on growing intolerance. She had also publicly supported New Delhi’s position on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir and the Modi Government’s August 2019 move to strip the state of its special status and reorganise it into two Union Territories.
Sources in New Delhi told DH that not only the government, but also the Sangh Parivar would soon have public engagements with Gabbard.
Rubio and Waltz are also known to have been consistent in supporting strong ties between India and the US within the Republican Party.