OBAMA’S PRAISE FOR DR SINGH
FORMER PRESIDENT PRAISES SONIA GANDHI’S ‘INTELLIGENCE’ BUT IS CRITICAL OF HER SON RAHUL IN NEW BOOK
BARACK OBAMA in his memoir has likened Indian opposition figure Rahul Gandhi to a “hapless student”, in biting commentary on the dynastic scion who twice led his party to crushing defeats.
In the book, A Promised Land, which was published on Tuesday (17), the former US president also described modern-day India as a success story, despite bitter feuds within political parties, armed separatist movements, and corruption scandals.
Obama visited India twice as president, first in 2010 and later in 2015.
In the first volume of his two-part book, Obama wrote that Gandhi has “a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject,” according to a New York Times review.
Gandhi led the Indian National Congress party in the 2014 and 2019 general elections, both of which resulted in decisive victories by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The 50-year-old has long struggled to combat perceptions that he is not interested in becoming prime minister, a position held by his grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi, both of whom were assassinated.
He spent his younger years studying and working in the United States and Britain before returning to India with expectations of guiding Congress, the party that has led India through most of its years since independence.
Gandhi has aggressively attacked Modi’s government on charges of fanning communalism and favouring business interests, but commentators have often described him as not being a natural politician. He stepped down from the helm of the Congress party after last election debacle but his mother, Sonia Gandhi, remains its president.
Obama offered a more positive assessment of former Indian prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh (from the Congress party), a mild-mannered economist whom he previously praised publicly.
As the chief architect of India’s economic transformation, Dr Singh seemed like a fitting emblem of the country’s progress, Obama said, adding that India’s transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s (when Dr Singh was the finance minister) unleashed the “extraordinary entrepreneurial” talents of Indians, leading to soaring growth rates, a thriving technology sector, and a steadily expanding middle class.
Obama noted that Dr Singh – who studied at Cambridge University – was a member of the Sikh religious minority who had risen to the highest office in the land. He was a self-effacing technocrat who had won people’s trust not by appealing to their passions, but by bringing about higher living standards and maintaining a well-earned reputation for not being corrupt.
During his November 2010 India visit, Obama said he and Dr Singh developed “a warm and productive” relationship.
“While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of US intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency,” Obama said. “What I couldn’t tell was whether Singh’s rise to power represented the future of India’s democracy or merely an aberration.”
Obama wrote that Dr Singh at the time was worried about India’s economy, cross-border terrorism and the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments. During a conversation without aides and note takers, Dr Singh told Obama: “In uncertain times, Mr President, the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.”
Obama wrote, “I nodded, recalling the conversation I’d had with Václav Havel (former president of Czechoslovakia) during my visit to Prague and his warning about the rising tide of illiberalism in Europe.
“If globalisation and a historic economic crisis were fuelling these trends in relatively wealthy nations – if I was seeing it even in the US with the Tea Party – how could India be immune?” Obama said.
Across the country, millions continued to live in squalor, trapped in sun-baked villages or labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indian industry enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas and moguls of old
would have envied, Obama said in the book. “Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity, with many Indians taking great pride in the knowledge that their country had developed a nuclear weapons program to match Pakistan’s, untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional annihilation,” he added.
On Sonia Gandhi, the former US president said she listened more than she spoke, careful to defer to Dr Singh when policy matters came up, and often steered the conversation toward her son.
“It became clear to me, though, that her power was attributable to a shrewd and forceful intelligence.” (Agencies)