Quickest Route To Indian Unity Is Expressing Hostility Toward Pakistan, Obama On India In New Book

Sumaira FH Published November 19, 2020 | 01:20 AM

NEW YORK, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Nov, 2020 ) :Former US President Barack Obama paints a picture of India as a country with "all-too-pervasive" violence and politics revolving around "religion, clan, and caste", as also hostility against Pakistan, in his latest memoir which hit bookstores on Tuesday.

"Across the country, millions continued to live in squalor, trapped in sunbaked villages or labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indian industry enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas and moguls of old would have envied," he writes in his new memoir, "A Promised Land".

"Violence, both public and private, remained an all-too-pervasive part of Indian life." "Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity" in India, Obama writes.

He says many Indians take "great pride in the knowledge that their country had developed a nuclear weapons programme to match Pakistan's, untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional annihilation".

He referred to India having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals, and writes, "The transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s had unleashed the extraordinary entrepreneurial talents of the Indian people -- leading to soaring growth rates, a thriving high-tech sector, and a steadily expanding middle class... and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's economic reforms lifted millions out of poverty".

"Despite its genuine economic progress," he added, "though, India remained a chaotic and impoverished place: largely divided by religion and caste, captive to the whims of corrupt local officials and power brokers, hamstrung by a parochial bureaucracy that was resistant to change.""A Promised Land" ends with 2011 and the next volume is to pick up after that. For that reason Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not figure in the book.