Obama in Delhi

Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
I have a feeling the visiting US President Barack Obama must have wondered during his Indian visit how often, and by how many in the past, during his six years as the US President, has he been ‘barracked’ as often as he was by his Indian host, Prime Minister Narendrabhai Damodardas Modi, the three days he spent in New Delhi.
The visitor must have been equally unsure how often had any of his numerous hosts the world over reached out to hug him before Modi went on that hugging spree the 72 hours the President was here. A bemused Barack Obama looked on good humouredly as Modi kept on ‘Baa-rrr-aacking’ him each time the President required to be mentioned by name.
Not for Mr. Modi the conventional Mr. President or Mr. Obama; it had to be different, a happy first-name-calling relationship. The Americans, you may or may not know, like informality. So President Obama became god, old Barack. And never so repetitiously as during the “radio-telecast” of Mr. Modi’s version of President Roosevelt’s war-time fireside radio chats with the American people.
“Man ki Baat’, thus named by the Prime Minister himself, also saw   him in a radio jockey’s role, reading  out listeners’ letters written to him and Obama by a patently handpicked correspondents, including reportedly Mr. Modi’s physician from Ahmedabad.  “This one is for B-a-r-a-c-k,’ a clearly happy R J Modi intoned whenever he picked up a letter addressed to the President.
By the time you get to read this, analysts/opinion-makers/editorial writers would have put you wise to the minutest details of the goings on in Delhi the time Obama spent talking to Modi and a few others including, thankfully one or two from the Congress, including Sonia Gandhi and Dr. Manmohan Singh; I have used ‘thankfully’ given the unusually bitter relationship between the ruling party and the Congress. Don’t ask me why the Obama visit got a near zero coverage in American domestic media.
Indian experts have, of course, told you by now of the in depth discussions on regional issues, besides the old hat Indo-Pak business; you would have also come to know of how the BJP Government said yes to aspects of Indo-US nuclear cooperation which the party had vehemently refused to do when Manmohan Singh begged of the then opposition BJP, to endorse these. The enlargement of our security concerns, against Chinese inroads, into the Pacific, Indian Ocean and South China Sea etc did prominently figure in the bilateral discussions, a first of sorts, heralding closer US-Japan-Australia cooperation in the region.
It goes without saying that the ‘bilaterals’ between the principals went on smoothly – there in fact was very little room left for other Government leaders to get involved in these – and this is not to take anything away from the solid ground work, some of it decisive, done in contacts between leaders of business from India and the US, some Indian Ministers included.
In fact the tone was set for speeding up programmes of cooperation between US enterprises, including, most importantly, in the Defence production sector. Some of these programmes have potentially mind boggling possibilities leading to unusual expansion of the manufacturing capacity in the country.
At the personal level Obama may have done Narendra Modi a great favour by focusing direct attention on what makes the India story so captivating apart from its being an attractive business destination. Then there was the more intimate session –not an inter-active one by a long shot — at what had been touted as a town hall meeting of the US type, sans the question-answer session.
At the overflowing Siri Fort Audtorium Obama purposively moved away from economic and security concerns to larger questions such as shared beliefs, values and dreams which had potential to make India and the US the best of partners. He traced the Indian story and his own country’s before it, the guarantees of freedom, diversity, human rights and dignity, written into their Constitutions, which people in the two countries have cherished.
Obviously Obama was unaware of the mischief played by someone in the BJP Government a day earlier to his very evocative presentation at Siri Fort that defiled the Indian Constitution by deleting the key word secular, among others, from its preamble to make the saffron dream of a Hindu Rashtra one of the possibilities for the future.
Obama would probably have been more vehement  than he was  in his later admonitions had he known  of the little games the party  publicists had played in getting the altered preamble published with the facetious explanation that the key words were dropped because these had been introduced via an amendment later and therefore deemed dispensable.
Returning to Obama’s speech he warned that the Indian story would collapse if the idea of India was compromised. He spoke sharply of the need to oppose forces that may try to divide the Indian nation on sectarian lines, away from cherished values like equality of opportunity across the divides of gender, colour, caste and religion. He even suggested a moratorium on retrograde, divisive trends. All trends to divide needed to be put an end to.
The peace we seek in the world begins in human hearts and would find its glorious expression when we look beyond any differences in religion or tribe and rejoice in the beauty of every soul. And nowhere is that more important than India, said the US President.
India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along religious faiths; so long as it is not splintered along any lines and is unified as one nation. And that is when all Indians, whatever  their faith, go to the movies and applaud actors like Shahrukh Khan, and when they celebrate athletes like Milkha Singh or Mary Kom, Obama rhetorically added. He did not forget to mention Article 25 of the Indian Constitution guaranteeing to citizens the freedom, among other things, to practice, propagate their religion. Obviously he had been well-briefed about the heightened threats to the Muslim and Christian minorities including pursuit of mass conversions by the Hindutva roughnecks.
For a visiting leader Obama indeed did some plain speaking on the markedly growing religious intolerance which the emergence of the BJP and the saffron parivar has fawned. And given the bonhomie the two principals had put on show the three days Obama was here one assumes the advice rendered by the visitor would be heeded.
If you ask me, Mr. Modi is too hardened a saffronite to do any more than continue paying lip service, if at all, to cliches like Sarvadharma Sambhav etc. My hope though would continue to be that the responsibility of his office will persuade him to see some merit in Obama’s very honest and dispassionate appraisal of the Indian situation, marked by a strong unleashing of negative forces of divisiveness by the saffron parivar.
Should the Obama visit cause a rethink on the part of Modi on just this single issue, I would personally call it a game-changer. I will rest my case at that and leave it to the pundits to do the customary hair-splitting in TV studios and in the tomes they write now or subsequently.

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