Mumbai: When the president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, was in the financial capital of India in 2013, he had told the audience that his distant relatives live in Mumbai.
Biden reiterated his claim two years later at an event in Washington, saying there are five Biden living in Mumbai.
With the 77-year-old Democrat set to be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States in just over two months, no one in Mumbai has so far turned up to claim he is related to Biden.
Decades after receiving a letter from someone with the surname Biden in Mumbai, shortly after he became a senator, Biden learned that his “great, great, great, great, great grandfather” had worked for the East India Company.
“There are five Bidens in Mumbai, India,” Biden, then vice president, told an audience in Washington in 2015 at an event organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the occasion of the India-US 10th anniversary. Civil nuclear agreement.
In 2013, when Biden traveled to Mumbai on his first vice presidential trip to India, he spoke about this letter he received when he first became a senator several decades ago.
In his speech at the Bombay Stock Exchange on July 24, 2013, Biden narrated his story of the ‘Biden of Mumbai’. “It is an honor to be back in India and here in Mumbai. Off script for a second here, I was reminded that I was elected to the United States Senate as a 29-year-old boy in 1972, and one of the first letters I received and I regret never having followed him.
“Perhaps some genealogist in the audience can follow me, but I received a letter from a gentleman named Biden – Biden, my name – from Mumbai, stating that we were related,” Biden had told the Mumbai audience seven years ago.
In his 2015 speech in Washington, Biden had stated that his “great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather” George Biden was a captain in the East India trading company and, after retirement, decided to settle in India and marry an Indian woman.
Biden had also said that someone provided him with the details, including phone numbers for the Bidens in Mumbai. He had informed the audience that he had not called his Mumbai relatives yet, but planned to do so.
It’s unclear if Biden managed to get in touch with them, as the five Biden he spoke of have yet to “show up.”
This story has been published from a news agency feed with no changes to the text. Only the title has been changed.
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