WASHINGTON: A number of young and accomplished Indian Americans have been inducted into President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team to assist it in the review of various departments and agencies, ahead of his installation as the 44th President of the US in January.
While the pride of place has gone to Sonal Shah, named a senior adviser to the transition team and lately designated to a key three-member panel that will craft the new administration’s high-tech policy priorities, several other ‘desis’ have been drafted to the various panels in recent days.
They include Nick Rathod, Parag Mehta, Anjan Mukherjee, Arti Rai, Rachana Bhowmik, Subhasri Ramanathan, Natasha Bilimoria and Puneet Talwar.
Then there is Preeta Bansal, who has been an adviser to the Obama campaign and is reportedly in contention for a high post in the Obama administration. She has served as special counsel in the Clinton Administration and is a past chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
AmLaw Daily, citing Obama insiders, recently reported that Bansal, a partner at the Skadden Arps law firm, was being considered for the prestigious post. If it materialises, Bansal would be the US’s first woman and first ‘desi’ Solicitor General.
It remains to be seen if Bansal, Shah and some of the other ‘desis’ in Obama transition land jobs in the Obama Administration.
Among the other Indian Americans co-opted by the Obama transition, Rathod has been named director to the Office of Inter-governmental Affairs, while Mehta will oversee affairs of minority groups, including Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as deputy director of inter-governmental affairs and public liaison.
Rathod has been a co-founder of ‘South Asians for Obama’, a grassroots group that was active among Americans of South Asian descent during the presidential race. An attorney, Rathod has worked as political director for former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.
Mehta, 31, makes his move to the Obama transition from the Democratic National Committee, where he served as director of external communications.
Rai, a former classmate of Obama at Harvard Law School, has been appointed member of the agency review team on science, technology, space, arts and humanities. Currently a professor of patent law at Duke University, Rai is among half-a-dozen probable persons to run the Patent and Trademark Office, according to Congress Daily, which took the pulse of some watchers of the intellectual property scene.
Mukherjee, an MBA from Harvard, is one of several lead persons named to the review team on economics and international trade. He is the managing director at the private equity firm Blackstone and a director of Steifel Laboratories.
Bhowmik and Ramanathan are part of the review team on the Department of Homeland Security. While Bhowmik has been a part of Obama’s legislative counsel in his Senate office, handling civil rights and national security issues, Ramanathan is an attorney and senior analyst with the Government Accountability Office.
Talwar and Bilimoria have been included in the State Department review panel. Talwar is a senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while Bilimoria is the executive director of the non-profit Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis.
