TOI correspondent from Washington:Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t yet born when Bollywood spun out the movie Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki (I am the sacred basil in your courtyard) in 1978, movie about fidelity. On an icy Wednesday evening in Washington DC, America’s first female, Hindu-American lawmaker and newly-minted intelligence czar, whose fealty to the US has often been questioned in recent times by traditionalist US establishment, crossed the threshold at Blair House, the US Presidential guest house, to greet an old friend and well-wisher, Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The meeting took place just hours after Gabbard had been confirmed by the US Senate to head the Directorate of National Intelligence, and minutes after Modi arrived in the US capital. The unusual engagement — spy chiefs seldom meet world leaders in public — certainly augurs well for intelligence cooperation between the two countries. “Met USA’s Director of National Intelligence, @TulsiGabbard in Washington DC. Congratulated her on her confirmation. Discussed various aspects of the India-USA friendship, of which she’s always been a strong votary,” Modi said in a social media post, with photos of the meeting, the first of his engagements in the US capital.
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As the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Gabbard will be not just America’s chief spook but also a cabinet-level official with oversight of 18 intelligence agency, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), an organisation so secretive that it was once dubbed No Such Agency. The DNI also serves as the principal advisor to the US president and his National Security Council on all intelligence matters. The office of the DNI also produces the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a classified document of latest intel from across the world that the US President reads almost first thing in the morning.
Crucially, the DNI also sets policy for intelligence sharing with foreign agencies, something that has been a sketchy work in progress with regard to India from the time then Home Minister L.K.Advani became the first high ranking minister to visit the CIA hq in Langley in 2002, in the months after 9/11.
But the Modi-Gabbard friendship goes beyond intel and politics. Although of American-Samoan heritage, Gabbard’s embrace of Hinduism, stemming from her mother’s conversion to Gaudiya Vaishnavism, has long drawn her to India. Modi was among the first to recognize the spiritual ties and invited her to India in 2014 soon after he became prime minister. Gabbard, then a first-term congresswoman from Hawaii, later presented as a gift to Modi a personal copy of the Bhagavad Gita she had read from her childhood, and on which she took the oath of office. A year later, when she got married in Oahu, Modi sent RSS veteran and then BJP spokesperson Ram Madhav, with gifts of a Ganesh statuette and a pashmina shawl, and a personal message.
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During the ceremony, Madhav took the stage to convey Modi’s greetings. “All of us here share the happiness of your family and loved ones on this important day,” he read from Modi’s letter, adding, “On behalf of our prime minister, I invite the newly-wed couple to celebrate their honeymoon in the land of devas.” He then delivered gifts from Modi—a pashmina shawl and a Ganesh statuette.
Gabbard never took up the “devas” offer but she is now tasked with battling, covertly, the “asuras,” although there is some confusion on who Trump puts in the category. One thing is certain; it is not the Russians.
Gabbard has long been pilloried in the US establishment as a “Russian stooge,” and significantly, she came over to Blair House to meet Modi soon after Trump had thrown Ukraine under the bus and announced he was meeting Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia. For India, which has long walked a tightrope between its longstanding ties with Moscow and its new waltz with Washington, there couldn’t be more auspicious news coming from — and in the form of — Tulsi Gabbard.