Former US president Barack Obama’s 768-page memoir ‘A Promised Land’ is making waves ever since excerpts from his book are published in the media. In his memoir, Obama said that Sonia Gandhi chose Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister, because he posed no threat to Rahul Gandhi.
He wrote, “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.” The Former President called Sonia a “striking woman in her sixties, dressed in a traditional sari, with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence.”
Sonia described Singh as the “chief architect of India’s economic transformation” and “wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest”, Obama also considered him as a “self-effacing technocrat who’d won the people’s trust not by appealing to their passions but bringing about higher living standards and maintaining a well-earned reputation for not being corrupt.”
He quoted, “It became clear to me, though, that her power was attributable to a shrewd and forceful intelligence.” He also recalls how Manmohan Singh told him that the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating in uncertain times adding that it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India, or anywhere else.
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