‘Man of uncommon wisdom… a gentle economist who lifted millions of Indians from poverty’: Obama about Manmohan Singh

A man of “uncommon wisdom and decency,” is how former US President Barack Obama described former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the first of his two-part memoir, A Promised Land. Obama describes his relationship with the former PM, Mahatma Gandhi’s life and his interest in India, in the book.

He adds that he had developed a “warm and productive” relationship with Congress leader after they first met in New Delhi in November 2010.

“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,” he reminisces in the book.

“While he [Mr. Singh] could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of US intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency; and during my visit to the capital city of New Delhi, we reached agreements to strengthen US cooperation on counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade,” he writes on Manmohan Singh’s foreign policy stance.

Commenting on Singh’s rise to power, he says, “What I couldn’t tell was whether [Manmohan] Singh’s rise to power represented the future of India’s democracy or merely an aberration.”

Manmohan Singh’s “restraint” against Pakistan after the November 2011 Mumbai attacks had cost him politically, Obama writes. “He [Mr. Singh] feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),” Obama notes, quoting Singh further, “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.”

The book mostly describes Obama’s first term from his perspective and hence lacks references to the rise of Narendra Modi and the former President’s relationship with the current Prime Minister.