Indo-Americans Branch Out To US Diplomatic Corps

0
197

WASHINGTON – In the annals of Indian immigrant academic and professional pursuits, serving in the US government hasn’t ranked very high since the sixties when Washington opened doors to them. Striving to strike roots in America, Indian parents typically want their children to branch out to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) subjects, often an offshoot of their own background.

Of course, in course of this, many Indian-Americans do end up serving in the government, handling subject ranging from health (Vivek Murthy and Bobby Jindal), to agriculture (Iqbal Siddiqui), to commerce (Karan Bhatia and Arun Kumar) to information technology (Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra). Most return to private sector at the end of a short stint in government. However, the US Foreign Service was generally considered a tough area to crack, in part because of the exacting security demands which follow the Foreign service Officers’ Test (FSOT) that qualifies one for the 15,000-strong cadre, among the largest in the diplomatic world.

“Top Secret” clearance needed for many jobs could be undermined by extensive foreign travel, dual citizenship, non-United States citizen family members, foreign spouses, and de facto allegiance to a foreign state (besides drug use, financial problems or a poor record of financial practices, frequent gambling etc).

But half century after the Immigration Act of 1965 brought large number of Indians to the US, second generation Indian-American are making the foreign service cut in large numbers, with many of them now in the senior levels of the US diplomatic corps. Last week’s announcement by US administration that it is nominating Geeta Pasi, a career foreign service officer, as its envoy to Chad, marked the third instance of a Indian-American becoming a US ambassador in the Obama administration, following Richard Verma going to New Delhi, and Atul Keshap to Colombo.

While Keshap and Pasi are career foreign service officers, Verma’s route took him through the military, the private sector, and Congress. Others, like Vinai Thummalapally, Obama’s roommate and friend from Occidental College, bagged sinecures (in his case as Ambassador to Belize) on account of political connections and contributions. Increasingly, Indian-Americans are entering the foreign service directly with the same verve and success as they do in other highly regarded professions such as medicine, engineering, and law, where they have made a mark.

Although the precise numbers are hard to obtain, by some accounts, there are dozens of Class I foreign service specialists of Indian-origin, including several in line to be ambassadors. Among them, Krishna Urs, who is the deputy chief of mission at the U.S Embassy in Madrid, and Uzra Zeya, deputy chief of the US mission in Paris. While the growing presence of Indian-Americans in the US administration has unsettled some Pakistani diplomats (the country’s ex-ambassador Hussain Haqqani was among those who wondered about its impact on policy, although there are also Pakistani-Americans in the mix), Indian officials treat the matter with equanimity, recognising, correctly, that they are Americans first and will represent US interests.