Mysore/Mysuru: Ambassador Atul Keshap, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, has been appointed to the US Embassy in New Delhi by Joe Biden administration to serve as Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, following the retirement of Ambassador Daniel Smith. It will be Atul’s second stint in India. 

Ambassador Atul Keshap will bring a wealth of experience to the role, having served previously at US Embassy, New Delhi and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia. He most recently served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs and as the US Ambassador to Sri Lanka and Maldives. 

Interestingly, Atul Keshap’s parents have deep roots in Mysuru. His father, Punjab-born Keshap Chander Sen (K.C. Sen) was a Partition-era refugee from Lahore who overcame a lot of adversity to graduate from the Delhi School of Economics and went on to become an international civil servant. He served at the International Labour Organisation and several other UN agencies. 

Atul Keshap was born in June 1971 in Nigeria and he was one of four children who grew up across countries like Lesotho, Zambia, Afghanistan and Austria.

After his international stint, K.C. Sen returned to India and settled in Mysuru. He came to Mysuru after 10 years, post-retirement where he founded a charity institution and called it ‘Lost Cause-Mini Fund’. The charity institution provided educational materials, food, medicine, blankets and other necessities to the homeless, needy widows, lepers, AIDS patients, the handicapped and the voiceless for nearly a decade until he passed away in 2008.

Every year during winter, K.C. Sen would distribute free woollen blankets to the poor on city streets. He would drive around in the night, place the blankets on the people sleeping on the pavements and quietly move away without any recognition and without identifying himself. This, at a time when there are people who crave for publicity at the drop of a hat. 

Atul Keshap’s mother Zoë Calvert’s grandfather Richard Creagh Mackubin Calvert served as an engineer in General Electric build Shivanasamudra Hydro Electric Project — which brought the first hydel power to India at the turn of the 20th century. K.C. Sen’s ashes were immersed in the Cauvery river that runs through Shivanasamudra. 

In his first stint, Atul Keshap, a senior diplomat who joined the US Department of Foreign Affairs in 1994, was a political counselor in New Delhi from 2005 to 2008. He was one of Ambassador David Malford’s key advisors on the US-India Private Nuclear Energy Cooperation Initiative. 

Two years later, he headed the Department of State’s South Central Asia Bureau for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives and Bhutan, and was promoted to Assistant  Secretary of State for South Asia in 2013.

Hours after his appointment, later, Atul Keshap posted a photo with his mother Zoe Calvert, tweeting, “Before departure for #India, I went home to #Charlottesville to seek my Mother’s blessings. She served in the #ForeignService at the US Embassy in New Delhi 1958-1960.” Atul Keshap’s wife Karen is also a foreign service officer.