Mumbai: US President-elect Joe Biden during his trip to India in 2013 had told an audience that he has some distant relatives living in Mumbai.
Joe Biden reiterated his claim again two years later at an event in Washington, he said there are five Bidens living in Mumbai. The 77-year-old Democrat is set to take oath as the 46th US President in just over two months, and nobody in Mumbai has turned up to claim that he is a relative of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden recounted that some decades ago, soon after becoming a senator, he had received a letter from someone in Mumbai by the last name of Biden. It was then that he learned of his "great, great, great, great, great grandfather" who had worked in the East India Company.
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"There are five Bidens in Mumbai, India," Biden had said. In 2013, when Biden travelled to Mumbai on his maiden vice presidential trip to India, he spoke about this letter he received when he became the senator for the first time several decades ago.
"It's an honour to be back in India and to be here in Mumbai. Off script for a second here, I was reminded I was elected to the United States Senate when I was a 29-year-old kid back in 1972, and one of the first letters I received and I regret I never followed up on it. Maybe, some genealogist in audience can follow up for me, but I received a letter from a gentleman named Biden - Biden, my name - from Mumbai, asserting that we were related," Biden had told the Mumbai audience seven years ago, PTI reported.
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Later in 2015, Biden had claimed that his "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 married an Indian woman.
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He was speaking at an event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of India-US civil nuclear deal.
Though, he informed the audience then that he was yet to call his Mumbai kin it is not clear if he did manage to contact them.
