India-US Ties In Question As Trump Appoints Sergio Gor Special Envoy And Ambassador To Delhi

The latest provocation from US President Donald Trump to India is the creation of a new post of Special Envoy of South and Central Asian countries, who will also double up as the US ambassador in New Delhi. This unprecedented saddling of Washington’s new man in New Delhi supervising a dozen other countries is intriguing, considering the current crisis in Indo-US ties.

To compound matters, the special envoy cum ambassador is 38-year-old maverick Sergio Gor, who has no expertise in the region nor diplomatic or political experience but is an inside hatchet man of Trump and a former collaborator of his son, Trump Junior.

South Block is struggling to wrap its head around the implications of this puzzling move from the White House amid the rapid downward spiral in bilateral ties. On the one hand, the belated discovery by Trump of not having an ambassador in a country of India’s size and purported strategic importance for seven long months, and the chosen envoy’s direct hotline to him, is a positive sign. However, there is considerable disquiet about whether Gor would have the time, diplomatic skills or even the inclination to repair the badly damaged relationship.

There is also deep concern at the larger ramifications of the wide regional mandate with which the US envoy has been armed. New Delhi has for long been overtly sensitive about foreign interference in this country’s relationships with its neighbours, strictly dealing with them on a bilateral level, particularly our troubled ties with Pakistan over Kashmir.

This was evident in the aftermath of the recent four-day conflict between the countries over the Pahalgam massacre, with the Modi government vehemently denying Trump’s repeated claims of brokering the ceasefire while Islamabad praised him to the skies for doing so.

Considering that India’s relationship with the United States nosedived after denying Trump’s boast of a peacemaker, the new envoy could well further press the point to please his boss.

It may also be recalled that the US President had also offered his role as a peacemaker between India and Pakistan, mischievously suggesting that his aides could book a dinner engagement between Prime Minister Modi and the Pakistani Air Marshal, and that once oil was discovered with the US help in Pakistan, it could be sold to India.

After all, what is to prevent Sergio Gor, during his trips between New Delhi and Islamabad as regional envoy from being his president’s mediating representative to further the latter’s quest for a Nobel Peace Prize?

The government’s pointed silence on Gor’s appointment, with Foreign Minister S Jaishankar’s cryptic response that he had “read” about it, hides the apprehension about how this will play out. Clearly, New Delhi plans to quietly accept Trump’s pet in the Indian capital, not wanting to further aggravate the bullying US president.

This is in significant contrast to the Manmohan Singh government’s ballistic response to the only previous occasion that Washington had tried to hyphenate India along with Pakistan and Afghanistan under the new Obama administration 27 years ago in suggesting a common special representative, Richard Holbrooke, a veteran diplomat and foreign policy expert.

New Delhi went “berserk” at the suggestion, as reported by the New Yorker, quoting White House sources. The then outgoing US Ambassador to India, David Mulford, reported back to Washington that both the then Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee had, in two separate meetings with him, raised serious objections to a common US special representative lumping India with Pakistan. These objections are recorded in classified cables from Mulford later revealed by WikiLeaks.

In a cable dated December 30, 2008, Mulford said that Menon informed him of the “sensitivity on the issue of a special envoy with a mandate to address the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir”. A week later the US ambassador reported in a cable dated January 7, 2009, that the Indian Foreign Minister had made the point to him even more forcefully.

“Mukherjee asked a series of penetrating questions about the incoming US administration, dwelling in particular on the appointment of a special envoy. Mukherjee was deeply concerned about any move toward an envoy with a broad regional mandate that could be interpreted to include Kashmir. Such a broad mandate would be viewed by India as risky and unpredictable, exposing issues of vital concern to India to the discretion of the individual appointed. ‘A special envoy smacks of interference and would be unacceptable,’ he said,” the cable read.

Today the situation is hugely different. The current government appears helpless at the prospect of a regional US envoy whose only credentials for the job were to be, first, a super fund collector for the Trump election campaign and then, as White House personnel chief, weed out all officials not considered loyalist enough to the boss. There is also worry about his closeness to Donald Trump Jr, through whom he entered Trump’s inner circle in a collaboration to publish glossy books about the Supreme Leader and his MAGA movement.

The foreign policy establishment is well aware that the younger Trump is involved in a wide variety of business and financial deals in Pakistan and Bangladesh with his close associates—Trump’s trusted Russia envoy Steve Whitkoff’s businessman son Zachary and hedge fund manager Gentry Beach. It will be surprising if Gor, completely clueless about the region, depends heavily on this already established network fuelling the Trump family coffers.

For the foreign policy establishment, regardless of what the sycophantic pundits say about how great it is to have a Trump insider in Delhi to mend Indo-US ties, the challenge of engaging with Gor is daunting. The US President has radically changed the age-old structure of US policy in South Asia, scuttling the appointment of previously nominated Indian-origin and South Asian expert Paul Kapur as Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, and creating in its place a regional envoy. Indian diplomacy is facing tough times ahead, what with it lacking innovative skills and the Prime Minister caught between his Vishwaguru ambitions and hard global realities.