[Ambassador-designate Sergio Gor and the PM]

The Tashkent-born, Sergey Gorokhovsky, rechristened Sergio Gor, is seen by many in the MEA and in the Modi government as a deus ex machina that will put the derailed bilateral relations wih the United States back on track. They are apparently as unfamiliar with the Washington reality and the relative standing of people in Trump’s vicinity as the Indian media and commentariat.

Gor has the usual chequered history of a foreign-born trying desperately to fit in any which way and to find his place in the American society. Gor’s Jewish parents left the disintegrating Soviet Union for Israel in 1994 before relocating to the US five years later. Along the way, the young Uzbek got Catholic schooling and converted to Catholicism. Predictably, he chose rightwing anti-Communist Republican party political channels to make a mark and serve his ambition. Gor is like any of a host of Indian-origin Americans, some of whom latched on to the liberal Democratic party ideology and followed a similar path to visibility in the political realm.

Essentially, the Russian-speaking Gor, a publicist and pamphleteer, who worked with the late Senator John McCain before tacking to the Trumpian wind that took Washington by storm, was rewarded with a not too important line job as head of personnel appointments at the White House. This designation sounds grander than is actually the case because most senior appointees in the current US Administration represent different constituencies and had their separate lines to Trump. Indeed, Gor began canvassing for the ambassadorship to India, perhaps, after realising that he was losing out in the race for an influential policy-making job as assistant to the US President that Stephen Miller was closing in on. The Delhi embassy was an attractive consolation prize, considering he would enjoy four years of vice-regal life, of being fawned over by the Indian government, its functionaries at his beck and call, genuflecting before him at Roosevelt House.

Yes, it is the same Miller who fleshed out the US designs for Venezuela by saying, in effect, that America had a greater right to Venezuelan natural resources (mainly oil) than Russia and China which had heretofore hogged them, and who, with condescension dripping from his lips, explained to CNN the Hobbesian world Trump is shaping. “We live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”, which he said defined “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Misreading of Gor’s relative importance in the Washington hierarchy by the Indian Establishment is of a piece with Jaishankar and his MEA cohort believing that Trump’s second term as President would herald the Golden Age of India-US cooperation! Op Sindoor saw the dunking of such expectations in a tank of ice-cold water. It occasioned Trump’s show of utter contempt for Modi and for India because of his conviction that he had read the Indian PM well enough to know that slapping him down would not lead to Delhi reacting adversely, and that he could personally insult Modi and put India’s economic nose out of joint with the imposition of tariffs that no other country faced, as long as Trump now and then salved the Indian PM’s ego by calling him a “good friend” and, as Gor did, talking of India as “essential” to peace in the Indo-Pacific, and just so long as America continued to draw benefits from the four foundational accords — General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geospatial Intelligence (BECA).

Thus, the offer of membership in the Pax Silica, conceived to counter China’s advances in the microchip field and to firm up a stable supply chain, as a curtain-raiser to Gor’s ambassadorial tenure was counterpoised the very next day by Trump musing about a 25% tariff atop the 50% tariffs Indian exports already face, with the threat held out of the tariffs being increased to the 500% level when all trade becomes nonsense. In like vein, the US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dismissed the free trade agreement under negotiation as of little account and asked the Indian government to get to the back of the line of countries seeking FTAs, just because, as he revealed, Modi failed to call Trump when the latter expected him to!

So much for India’s essentiality and Modi’s closeness to Trump! But Modi’s and India’s being treated as doormat is acceptable to the PM’s advisers, who have been counselling restraint and still more restraint in dealing with Trump, who knows a punching bag when he sees it. This when the evidence clearly shows that a display of self-respect as reflected in a coldish reception to Gor, graduated standoffishness, and dilution of the foundational accords, combined with showy assertions of common interest with the EU and the leading European states and with Russia, would have had a tremendous impact, conveying to Washington the costs of taking Delhi for granted, and daring Trump to seek some other counterweight to China in Asia, which is not there.

But back to Gor, and his supposed access to Trump, and how it is expected to benefit India. If he was as valuable to Trump as people here make him out to be, why would the American President let him go, cart him off to distant Delhi? The fact is Gor cannot just pick up the phone, call Trump, and get some wrinkle or the other the Modi regime wants ironed out, to be done in a jiffy. With regard to Trump and Gor, it is more a case of a servitor being accommodated. But out of sight, out of mind, really matters where a US president like Trump is concerned, whose attention span is as short as his impulsiveness is electric. Gor did little in policy terms whilst in Washington, and can do even less from Delhi other than to snuffle Trump’s insults