Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti named US envoy to India

US President Joe Biden on Friday nominated the Democrat mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti as the country’s envoy to India, a country of increasing significance to the United States.

Garcetti, who has been the leader of the country’s second-largest city since 2013, had long been seen as seeking to bolster his resume with a new responsibility after declining to seek the presidency last year.

The 50-year-old Navy veteran has been a Rhodes Scholar and is an amateur jazz pianist.

“And should I be confirmed, I’ll bring this same energy, commitment, and love for this city to my new role and will forge partnerships and connections that will help Los Angeles,” Garcetti said on his nomination.

If confirmed by the Democratic-run Senate, Garcetti would take up an ambassadorship with a lot of history and an equal amount of promise for the future.

Previous tenants of Roosevelt House, as the official residence in New Delhi is known, include the celebrated economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the policy intellectual Daniel Moynihan, who went on to become a senator.

Garcetti would head to New Delhi at a time that the United States is seeking to flesh out a burgeoning relationship with India in the face of an increasingly assertive China, the only other nation of a billion-plus people.

Biden has stepped up the “Quad” partnership of the United States, India, Japan, and Australia — four democracies that largely see common cause on China.

But Garcetti, the first Jewish mayor of Los Angeles, would also head to India amid growing concern in the United States, especially in the Democratic Party, over the treatment of minorities under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

Biden as a candidate voiced disappointment over a citizenship law pushed by Modi that critics say would disenfranchise Muslims and the State Department last year voiced rare, if muted, criticism of India over a sweeping crackdown in Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Garcetti as mayor won the Olympics for Los Angeles in 2028 and has pushed forward major projects on job creation, climate change, and mass transit, helping transform a city once synonymous with the automobile.

But Garcetti would leave Los Angeles at a time of rising public concern on homelessness, long a major issue in the city.