New Delhi: Former US president Barack Obama has written that he had doubts if Rahul Gandhi would be able to successfully take on the baton from Manmohan Singh and fulfil “the destiny laid out by his mother” and preserve “the Congress Party’s dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP”.
Obama, in his memoir A Promised Land, has described a dinner he had with Rahul, Sonia and Singh in 2010, after which he wondered who would take over once Singh left office.
“The prime minister and his wife walked us to our car. In the dim light, he looked frail, older than his seventy-eight years, and as we drove off I wondered what would happen when he left office,” Obama has written. “Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Party’s dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP?
“Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post–Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net,” he added. “Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic, multi religious societies like India and the United States.”
Some five years after the dinner, the Congress party faced a drubbing in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance winning 336 seats, while the Congress-led UPA was reduced to 60 seats in the 543-member House.
A Promised Land, which released Tuesday, is the first of a planned two volumes that Obama has written about his tenure as the president of the United States from 2009 to 2017.
His description of Rahul Gandhi as lacking “either aptitude or passion to master the subject” created much controversy last week.
While Obama called Rahul “smart and earnest” and also wrote that he had “good looks resembling his mother’s”, he went on to describe him as having 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”.
“He offered up his thoughts on the future of progressive politics, occasionally pausing to probe me on the details of my 2008 campaign,” Obama has written.
The former president described Sonia as having “dark, probing eyes and quiet, regal presence”, at the same dinner.
“That she — a former stay-at-home mother of European descent — had emerged from her grief after her husband was killed by a Sri Lankan separatist’s suicide bomb in 1991 to become a leading national politician testified to the enduring power of the family dynasty,” he has written.
“At dinner that night, Sonia Gandhi listened more than she spoke, careful to defer to Singh when policy matters came up, and often steered the conversation toward her son,” he has added. “It became clear to me, though, that her power was attributable to a shrewd and forceful intelligence.”
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‘Man of uncommon wisdom and decency’
Obama has also written extensively about his relationship with former Indian PM Manmohan Singh, who he has described as being “wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest”. He has also credited Singh for having “engineered the modernization of his nation’s economy”.
“A gentle, soft-spoken economist in his seventies, with a white beard and a turban that were the marks of his Sikh faith but to the Western eye lent him the air of a holy man, he had been India’s finance minister in the 1990s, managing to lift millions of people from poverty,” Obama has written.
“For the duration of his tenure as prime minister, I would find Singh to be wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest,” he has added. “Despite its genuine economic progress, though, India remained a chaotic and impoverished place: largely divided by religion and caste, captive to the whims of corrupt local officials and power brokers, hamstrung by a parochial bureaucracy that was resistant to change.”
Obama further writes that “modern-day India counted as a success story, having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals”.
“The transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s had unleashed the extraordinary entrepreneurial talents of the Indian people — leading to soaring growth rates, a thriving high-tech sector, and a steadily expanding middle class,” he adds.
Obama also describes Singh as “a chief architect of India’s economic transformation”, who “seemed like a fitting emblem of this progress: a member of the tiny, often persecuted Sikh religious minority who’d risen to the highest office in the land, and a self-effacing technocrat who’d 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”.
Obama further writes that Singh and he “had developed a warm and productive relationship” and describes the latter as “a man of uncommon wisdom and decency.”
“While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency; and during my visit to the capital city of New Delhi, we reached agreements to strengthen U.S. cooperation on counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade,” Obama has written.
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‘Singh owed his position to Sonia’
However, Obama expresses a sense of caution and hesitance in how he interprets Singh’s rise as the PM.
“What I couldn’t tell was whether Singh’s rise to power represented the future of India’s democracy or merely an aberration,” he has written.
In a separate chapter, Obama describes Indian politics as still revolving “around religion, clan, and caste”.
“In that sense, Singh’s elevation as prime minister, sometimes heralded as a hallmark of the country’s progress in overcoming sectarian divides, was somewhat deceiving.”
Obama wrote that Singh owed his position to Sonia Gandhi, who had anointed him as the PM after declining to take the job.
“More than one political observer believed that she’d chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party,” he has written.
Ramayana, Bollywood movies & ‘Dahl’
Obama has also revealed in his book that he spent part of his childhood listening to the tales of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and got introduced to Bollywood movies and ‘dahl’ during his college days.
“I’d never been to India before, but the country had always held a special place in my imagination. Maybe it was its sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages spoken,” Obama has written, referring to his presidential visit to the country in 2010.
“Maybe it was because I’d spent a part of my childhood in Indonesia listening to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahābhārata, or because of my interest in Eastern religions, or because of a group of Pakistani and Indian college friends who’d taught to me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies,” he wrote.
‘Profoundly influenced’ by Mahatma Gandhi
Obama, in his book, has also written about how Mahatma Gandhi had “profoundly influenced” his thinking.
“As a young man, I’d studied his writings and found him giving voice to some of my deepest instincts,” the leader wrote. “Gandhi’s actions had stirred me even more than his words; he’d put his beliefs to the test by risking his life, going to prison, and throwing himself fully into the struggles of his people.”
Obama has also talked about his visit to Mumbai’s Mani Bhavan, where Gandhi had resided for some years.
“I stared at the spartan floor bed and pillow, the collection of spinning wheels, the old-fashioned phone and low wooden writing desk, trying to imagine Gandhi present in the room, a slight, brown-skinned man in a plain cotton dhoti, his legs folded under him, composing a letter to the British viceroy or charting the next phase of the Salt March,” he writes. “And in that moment, I had the strongest wish to sit beside him and talk. To ask him where he’d found the strength and imagination to do so much with so very little. To ask how he’d recovered from disappointment.”
Obama has further written of how despite his “extraordinary gifts, Gandhi hadn’t been able to heal the subcontinent’s deep religious schisms or prevent its partitioning into a predominantly Hindu India and an overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan”.
“Despite his labors, he hadn’t undone India’s stifling caste system.”
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