Biden picks Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti to be U.S. ambassador to India

WASHINGTON, July 9 (Reuters) – President Joe Biden has named Los Angeles Mayor and climate protection activist Eric Garcetti as U.S. ambassador to India, a country Washington sees as a key partner in its efforts to roll back China’s growing power and influence .

Garcetti, a Biden Loyalist who helped direct the successful Biden Harris 2020 election campaign, has been Mayor of Los Angeles since 2013.

The White House biography that accompanied the announcement of Garcetti’s nomination highlighted his role in co-founding the non-partisan network Climate Mayors and in leading more than 400 US mayors to adopt the Paris Agreement.

Garcetti is the current chairman of C40 Cities, which he described as “a network of 97 of the world’s largest cities taking bold climate action,” and led the organization’s engagement and expansion in India and its global response to COVID-19 Pandemic.

India is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases worldwide after China and the USA, but with far lower per capita emissions than these countries. It is under pressure from the United States and others to commit to a goal of decarbonizing its economy by 2050.

Garcetti issued a statement saying he was “honored” to accept the nomination, which must be confirmed by the US Senate.

Garcetti was a Rhodes Fellow who studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics and also conducted field research on nationalism, ethnicity and human rights in Southeast Asia and Northeast Africa, the White House said.

He is said to have served 12 years as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, serving under the command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and with the Defense Intelligence Agency before retiring as a lieutenant in 2017.

Biden has tried to strengthen ties with India, particularly through the Quad country group that includes Australia and Japan, all of whom share concerns about China.

The White House says Biden will host a quad executives summit this year after a virtual meeting in March, focusing on infrastructure.

The group agreed at the meeting that Indian drug maker Biological E Ltd would produce at least one billion doses of vaccine by the end of 2022, mainly for Southeast Asian and Pacific countries.

However, India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, was subsequently hit by a catastrophic wave of infections and halted vaccine exports amid fierce criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s domestic vaccination efforts.

Reporting by Eric Beech and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Leslie Adler and Sonya Hepinstall

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