Former US President Barack Obama in 1st volume of his memoir “A promised Land” has pointed out that former Indian PM Manmohan Singh owed his position to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and she chose him because he posed no threat to her son Rahul Gandhi who she was grooming to take over the Congress party.
“(Singh) owed his position to Sonia Gandhi... 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 ... son Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress party,” Obama writes in the memoir.
Interestingly, Obama has heaped praise on former Indian President Manmohan Singh for his sagacity and policies.
“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. For the duration of his tenure as Prime Minister, I would find Singh to be wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest,” writes Obama praising the former Indian PM.
He has also talked about his familiarity with India, his interaction with Indian leaders, and his familiarity with Ramayana and Mahabharata that has been there since his childhood. His memoir also documents his love for dal and keema that he can cook himself and he likes watching Bollywood movies.
The book also highlights twists and turns between the relations of India and the US during the period. In this regard, he recalls many incidents. For example, as a senator in 2006, Obama introduced what would be known as a “killer amendment” to the India-US nuclear agreement, later known as the Hyde Act.
Barack Obama’s book, “A Promised Land” is the first volume of his memoir and it is an account of his 1st tenure as the US president from 2009 to 2011. It was published on 17th November 2020.
