Former US president Barack Obama‘s memoirs have already caused a minor stir in India – his frank, unflattering description of Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the main opposition Congress party incensed the latter’s supporters and amused his detractors.
A Promised Land, the first volume of Mr Obama’s account of his political career which released on Tuesday, is a vivid and racy read. In it, he spends some 1,400 words writing of his first visit to India in November 2010 when the now-opposition Congress party was in power – and his impressions of then prime minister Manmohan Singh and party president Sonia Gandhi.
Mr Obama recalls that when he met Manmohan Singh, he had told him that he feared “rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of Hindu nationalist BJP”, the main opposition party at the time.
Mr Singh had resisted calls to retaliate against Pakistan after gunmen attacked the financial capital Mumbai leaving 166 dead. But “this restraint had cost him politically,” Mr Obama writes.
“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”, Mr Singh had told him.
Mr Obama said Rahul Gandhi “seemed smart and earnest, his good looks resembling his mother’s”.
“He offered up his thoughts on the future of progressive politics, occasionally pausing to probe me on the details of my 2008 campaign,” Mr Obama writes.
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Source: BBC NEWS
