Tribune News Service
New Delhi, November 16
Former US President Barack Obama describes former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as a “man of rare wisdom and decency” in his first volume of memoirs.
In India much attention has thus far been paid to a stray phrase from his memoirs about Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in his 900-page memoir, “A Promised Land.” He says that a decade ago, Rahul had a “nervous and reportless quality about him, as if he were a student who had done coursework and was eager to impress the teacher, but deep down lacked the aptitude or passion to master. the topic”.
Rahul, “as handsome as Sonia,” seemed smart and serious when he polled Obama in his 2008 campaign and reiterated progressive views. Sonia was a “striking 60-year-old woman” who “listened more than she spoke, careful to give in to Singh” when questions of politics arose and often turned the conversation toward her son.
“However, it was clear to me that his power was attributable to a cunning and forceful intelligence,” he adds.
A private conversation with Singh and his musings proved prophetic. What I couldn’t say was whether Singh’s rise to power represented the future of India’s democracy or just an aberration. …… .. The prime minister spoke more openly about the clouds he saw on the horizon… Singh had resisted calls to retaliate against Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks, but his restraint had cost him politically. He feared that growing anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“In times of uncertainty, Mr. President,” said the prime minister, “the call for religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not that difficult for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else. ”
This phrase prompted Obama to recall his conversation with (former Iron Wall dissident, Nobel laureate and former Czech president) Václav Havel about the rising tide of bad liberalism in Europe that globalization and an economic crisis were fueling in relatively wealthy nations.
Obama was watching it in the United States with the Tea Party and felt that the truth about India was that it still bore little resemblance to the egalitarian, peaceful and sustainable society that Gandhi had envisioned. Expressing hostility towards Pakistan was still the quickest path to national unity, and many Indians were proud that their country had developed a nuclear weapons program on par with Pakistan’s.
Before landing in Mumbai on his first visit to India, the country had held a special place in his imagination. It was partly because of the large size of India and also because he had spent part of his childhood in Indonesia listening to the Ramayana and the Mahābhārata. It could have been because of his interest in Eastern religions, or because of a group of college friends from Pakistan and India who taught him how to cook Dal and Keema and introduced him to Bollywood movies.
More than anything, however, his fascination with India had to do with Mahatma Gandhi, whom he puts on a par with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela. Gandhi’s actions had moved me even more than his words; He would put his beliefs to the test by risking his life, going to prison and giving himself fully to the struggles of his people. ”
On a visit to Mani Bhavan, Gandhi’s longstanding base of operations in Mumbai, Obama felt the “greatest desire to ask Gandhi where he had found the strength and imagination to” do so much with so little. To ask how he had recovered from the disappointment? ”
Gandhi, like Obama in office, had to settle for less. “Despite all his extraordinary gifts, Gandhi had not been able to heal the deep religious schisms of the subcontinent or prevent its partition… a seismic event in which countless people died. Despite his work, he had not broken the stifling caste system of India. Somehow, however, he had marched, fasted, and preached well into his seventies, until the last day of 1948, when, on the way to prayer, a young Hindu extremist shot him point-blank and saw his ecumenism as a betrayal of Faith ”.
In a clear vision of modern Indian politics and the power structure at the top in 2010, Obama said Singh’s elevation as prime minister is sometimes heralded as a hallmark of the country’s progress in overcoming sectarian divisions. But it was “somewhat misleading.”
“He had not originally become prime minister as a result of his own popularity … he owed his position to Sonia … more than one political observer believed that she had chosen Singh precisely because, as an elderly Sikh without a political base national, posed no threat to his 40-year-old son, Rahul, whom he was grooming to take over the Congress Party. ”
After leaving the dinner where he briefly evaluated Rahul and Sonia, Obama wondered what would happen when Singh left office. “Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling his mother’s destiny and preserving the congressional party’s grip on the divisive nationalism promoted by the BJP?”
Obama was clairvoyant again. “Somehow, I had doubts. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part … Except now I found myself wondering if the all too human desire to overcome our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others was too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. ”
“And as much as I had wished otherwise, there was no Mahatma Gandhi around to contain those urges.
The second volume of Obama’s memoirs will address the US perception of the UPA 2 corruption scandals, his subsequent meetings with Singh, and his interactions with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India in the first volume had about 3,200 words. Half were related to his first visit to India in 2010 and the rest to Obama and Hillary in a conclave between Brazil, South Africa, Brazil and China. Lula and Jacob Zuma “looked ashamed” at the papers in front of them, but as expected, Singh and Wen Jiabao “remained impassive.”
