Sonia Gandhi chose Manmohan Singh because he posed no threat to Rahul Gandhi: Barack Obama
Former US president Barack Obama’s feedback on Indian leaders, together with Rahul Gandhi, in his memoir “A Promised Land”, grabbed headlines final week, with the BJP highlighting the crucial observations made by Obama concerning the Gandhi scion.
Obama mentions in his ebook that India turned a extra market-based financial system within the 1990s, which led to main development and a rising center class within the nation. “As a chief architect of India’s economic transformation, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh 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,” mentioned Obama.
Talking about former PM Manmohan Singh, Obama writes in his memoir that PM Singh had resisted calls to launch assaults in opposition to Pakistan after 26/11 Mumbai assaults, however the choice prompted him political injury. “He feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). ‘In uncertain times, Mr. President,’ the prime minister said, ‘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’,” he writes, quoting former PM Singh.
Obama writes that India’s politics nonetheless revolved round faith, clan, and caste. He provides that Dr Singh’s elevation as prime minister, which was additionally known as as a trademark of the nation’s progress in overcoming sectarian divides, was not really true.
Read: Here’s what ex-US President Barack Obama mentioned about PM Modi in 2015
“… More than one political observer believed that she’d (Sonia Gandhi) had 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,” mentions Obama.
Obama additionally remembers a dinner he as soon as had at former PM Singh’s residence. The dinner was additionally attended by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.
On Sonia Gandhi, he says she “listened more than she spoke, careful to defer to Singh when policy matters came up, and often steered the conversation toward her son”.
He continues: “It became clear to me, though, that her power was attributable to a shrewd and forceful intelligence. As for Rahul, he 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. But there was 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.”
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Later as he drove off, Mr Obama writes, he questioned what would occur when Dr Singh left workplace: “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?”
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