when did obama visit india

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The highlights of president obama's visit to india.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Naredra Modi have tea in the garden gazebo at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India. January 25, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

"Chalein saath saath; forward together we go."

-- India-U.S. Delhi Declaration of Friendship

President Obama and the First Lady traveled to India this week -- their first time visting the South Asian nation since Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn in on May 26, 2014. America and India are true global partners in the work of strengthening economies and strong democracies. That is why the President is the first to have visited India twice while in office. 

President Barack Obama participates in a ceremonial welcome at Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi, India. January 25, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

As Prime Minister Modi said, "This is a natural global partnership. It has become even more relevant in the digital age. It is needed even more in our world for far-reaching changes and widespread turmoil. The success of this partnership is important for our progress and for advancing peace, stability and prosperity around the world."

On Board with Kal Penn: "A Trip of Firsts" 

Actor and former Obama administration official Kal Penn gives us a rundown on what brought President Obama to India this time around. 

"Abide with Me" :  A State Dinner 

President Barack Obama toasts Prime Minister Naredra Modi during a State Dinner hosted by President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi, India. January 25, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In his remarks at a reception with President Mukherjee, the President quoted a hymn that was dear to Mahatma Gandhi's heart: 

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me. 

"Here in the eventide, Indians and Americans, let us know, in the darkness or day, in good times or bad, whenever one of us looks to the other, we will surely say, abide with me," he said. 

Motorcycles, Military Parades, and More: The 66th Republic of India Day Celebrations

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama view the Republic Day Parade with President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the Rajpath saluting base in New Delhi, India. January 26, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

The President and the Prime Minister of India welcomed President Obama as the chief guest at India's 66th Republic Day celebrations -- a day that honors when India's constitution officially went into effect. President Obama is the first U.S. president to attend this historic event. 

President Barack Obama speaks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the Republic Day Parade at the Rajpath saluting base in New Delhi, India. January 26, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama view the Republic Day Parade with President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the Rajpath saluting base in New Delhi, India. January 26, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Creating Progress: Cooperating in the Fight Against Climate Change

President Barack Obama participates in a traditional greeting with President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi following a ceremonial welcome at Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi, India. January 25, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The President and Prime Minister Modi pledged to enhance U.S.-Indian cooperation on our mutual climate and clean energy goals. From our highly successful U.S.-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy (PACE) umbrella program to technical work on emerging technologies, the U.S. and India made important progress on combating climate change. 

The agreements include: 

• Enhancing bilateral climate change cooperation to achieve a successful and ambition agreement in Paris this year.
• Cooperating on Hydroflurocarbons to make concrete progress in the Montreal Protocol this year
• Expanding PACE-R, the U.S.-India Joint Clean Energy Reserach and Development Center, to extend funding for research on solar energy, energy efficiency, and advanced biofuels. 
• Launching air quality cooperation to help urban residents reduce their exposure to harmful levels of air pollution. 

See a full list of what the U.S. and India agreed on to combat climate change here .

True Global Partners: Incentivizing Trade and Investment

Under President Obama, trade between the two countries has increased by about 60 percent to nearly $100 billion a year -- a record high. But that's still hundreds of billions less than the trade we do with China. "We've got to do better," the President said, speaking at a U.S.-India Business Council Summit in New Delhi. So today, the President announced a series of additional steps that will generate more than $4 billion in trade and investment with India while supporting thousands of jobs in both countries:

• The Export-Import Bank will commit up to $1 billion in financing to support "Made-in-America" exports to India.
• OPIC will support lending to small and medium businesses across India that will result in more than $1 billion in loans in underserved rural and urban markets.
• The U.S. Trade and Development Agency will aim to leverage nearly $2 billion in investments in renewable energy in India.  

Read the President's full remarks here . 

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama wave to the crowd at the Rajpath saluting base following the Republic Day Parade in New Delhi, India. January 26, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Tanya Somanader

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Timeline of US presidential visits to India

Before Donald Trump, six US presidents have visited India, with Barack Obama the only one to make two official trips.

New Delhi, India – Donald Trump has embarked on his maiden visit to India becoming the seventh US president to visit the South Asian country.

He is accompanied by a high-level delegation, as well as his wife First Lady Melania Trump, daughter Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Keep reading

‘political spectatorship’: modi rolls out red carpet for trump, as trump heads to india, a trade deal appears elusive, at us rally, modi backs trump, takes aim at pakistan.

Trump arrived on Monday in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the western state of Gujarat, where he addressed a crowd of more than 100,000 Indians at a cricket stadium.

The event was called “Namaste Trump” (Hello Trump), in reciprocation to the “Howdy Modi” extravaganza Trump hosted last year for the Indian PM in the US city of Houston.

Ties between the two countries have improved greatly after the end of the Cold War, during which Washington leaned towards India’s rival, Pakistan, but has embraced India as a strategic partner against China in recent decades.

Barack Obama, Trump’s predecessor, is the only US president to have made two official visits to India.

We take a look at previous visits by the US presidents:

Dwight D Eisenhower – 1959

Dwight D Eisenhower in 1959 was the first US president to visit India. His visit was during the tenure of the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Eisenhower received a warm welcome and was greeted with a 21-gun salute when he landed in the capital, New Delhi. Huge crowds lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the 34th US president in his open-top car.

Besides delivering a public speech at New Delhi’s Ramlila ground, Eisenhower addressed members of both Houses of Parliament. The four-day trip included a stopover in his “dream place”, the Taj Mahal, which was built by Mughal ruler Shah Jahan in the 16th century.

The trip was billed a success and considered a landmark event in US-India relations as it came early in the Cold War, during which the US and Pakistan had become close allies.

Richard M Nixon – 1969

Richard M Nixon visited India on July 31, 1969. Unlike Eisenhower, Nixon spent less than a day in India as the trip was largely meant to reduce tensions between him and then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Two years later, during the India and Pakistan war of 1971, which lead to the creation of Bangladesh, the US sided with its Cold War ally, Pakistan.

According to tapes declassified by the US State Department, Nixon had reportedly told the White House that Indians were “slippery, treacherous people”.

Jimmy Carter – 1978

Jimmy Carter came to India in January 1978, when the Janata Party’s Morarji Desai was the prime minister.

During his three-day visit, Carter addressed India’s parliament and held several meetings with Indian politicians. Carter visited a village near New Delhi, bringing a television set as a gift.

His visit was meant to break the ice between New Delhi and Washington, especially against the backdrop of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence and India’s nuclear test of 1974.

However, he was not able to convince Prime Minister Desai to give up India’s nuclear ambitions, a development that irritated the US.

Bill Clinton – 2000

Bill Clinton, the 42nd US president, visited India in March 2000, more than two decades after the last visit by a US president.

His trip during the prime ministership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee came after a prolonged lull in the relations between the two countries. It also came after India opened its economy for foreign investors in the 1990s.

Clinton’s visit signified the beginning of closer US-India strategic and economic ties. During the 1999 war between Pakistan and India, the US under Clinton sided with India, the first time it had supported India against Pakistan.

New Delhi-based foreign policy expert Pramit Pal Chaudhuri said it was President Clinton who restarted India-US relations.

“Before Clinton, no US president had visited India for 20 years. Clinton in many ways re-engaged with India after two decades, signalling that America was taking India seriously one more time for number of reasons; nuclear test, economic growth and so on,” he said.

“Bush took it to the highest possible levels with a nuclear deal and Obama consolidated on the strategic side,” said Chaudhuri, who is also the foreign editor at Hindustan Times newspaper.

George W Bush – 2006

George W Bush visited New Delhi in 2006 when the US was being condemned worldwide for its 2003 invasion of Iraq. His trip was met with countrywide protests, with left-wing parliamentarians boycotting his address.

However, the three-day trip boosted the strategic relationship between the two countries, especially in matters of trade and nuclear technology. Bush and then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finalised the framework of the nuclear deal that ended New Delhi’s isolation from the nuclear equipment suppliers market.

Michael Kugelman, South Asia senior associate at The Wilson Center, said the US-India relationship improved exponentially since the early 1990s, and especially since the early 2000s.

“The civil nuclear accord [under President Bush] was a milestone and, from that point, the relationship has really taken off -though it has also been saddled by outsize and unmet expectations.”

Barack Obama – 2010 and 2015

Barack Obama is the only US president to make two official visits to India. On his first visit, Obama landed in Mumbai instead of New Delhi as a show of solidarity following the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008, which killed 166 people.

During the trip, he backed India’s bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. Obama and Singh, prime minister at the time, also signed trade deals worth $10bn and agreed to boost defence and national security ties.

Obama visited India again in 2015 as the chief guest on Republic Day under the administration of Prime Minister Modi.

During the trip, the Democratic president made comments on religious freedom in the country, saying “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith”.

Donald Trump – 2020

Donald Trump is the seventh US president to visit India, where he was given a warm welcome.

A personal rapport has developed between Indian Prime Minister Modi and Trump, both of whom have used the theatrics of diplomacy to strike a chord with their respective domestic audiences.

Both right-wing leaders have been criticized for pursuing an Islamophobic agenda – Trump for his Muslim ban and Modi for blocking naturalisation for Muslim immigrants and asylum seekers.

The US is India’s second-largest trading partner after China, with annual bilateral trade going from $11bn in 1995 to $142bn in 2018, according to official US data. But the two countries have been wrangling over a trade deal as Trump pushed for more concessions from New Delhi. 

The main focus of this trip will be on all the spectacle and on all the strong chemistry between Trump and Modi. But there's a strategic dimension to it as well by  Michael Kugelman, South Asia senior associate at The Wilson Center

“To be sure, the main focus of this trip will be on all the spectacle and on all the strong chemistry between Trump and Modi. But there’s a strategic dimension to it as well,” said Kugelman from The Wilson Center.

Foreign policy expert Chaudhuri said “Trump’s visit has been a missing piece in Modi’s foreign policy” and this visit has “fulfilled that space”.

He said that by coming to India despite the fact that there is not going to be a trade deal, Trump signals to the rest of the US government that “he takes the US-India relationship seriously and he expects them to move forward on the other issues be it defence and diplomacy.”

Safiya Ghori Ahmad, South Asia director at Washington, DC-based McLarty Associates said it would interesting to see “the deliverables” from the trip.

“I do hope that we see more than a rally, and actually see solutions to long-standing economic issues that impact US companies,” Ahmad said.

5 Things You Need to Know About Obama’s Visit to India

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to touch down in New Delhi on Sunday morning, kicking off a highly anticipated three-day visit that will see him attend India’s Republic Day parade on Jan. 26.

Here are the five things you need to know as the President arrives in the Indian capital.

1. This is a highly symbolic visit with many firsts Obama will be the first U.S. President to attend the Jan. 26 parade, a Soviet-style jamboree to mark the day in 1950 India’s constitution came into force. Past invitees to the annual celebration include Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Nicholas Sarkozy. But that’s not all: when he lands in New Delhi, Obama will also become the first sitting U.S. leader to visit India twice, following an earlier trip in 2010.

2. This is not the first (nor even second) meeting between Obama and the new Indian leader Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who came to power following Indian national elections in 2014, traveled to the U.S. in September, visiting New York City and calling in at the White House in Washington D.C. “It is rare for leaders, especially American presidents, to have successive summits so quickly,” Tanvi Madan, director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution, told TIME . Modi and Obama also met at the G20 Summit in Australia and the East Asia Summit in Burma last year.

3. Relations between the two countries haven’t always been smooth Another reason this visit is significant is that it symbolizes a rapid improvement in U.S.-India ties, which were nearly undone at the end of 2013 over a row involving Devyani Khobragade, India’s deputy consul general in New York. Accused of visa fraud and underpaying her house-keeper, she was arrested and strip-searched by U.S. law enforcement, sparking angry protests and diplomatic retaliations from India.

4. The symbolism may be backed up by some substance Modi and Obama will discuss a whole host of issues when they sit down for talks. Among those topping the agenda will be bilateral trade, climate change, increased defense cooperation and investment in India’s civilian nuclear sector, where a deal is being sought to break a long-standing impasse over a local law that is blamed for keeping foreign nuclear companies from getting involved in the Indian market. (It’s not yet clear if the two sides will come to an agreement in time for the President’s arrival.) Obama and Modi are also expected to discuss the regional geopolitical situation.

5. And finally, there’s a bilateral radio show Obama will join Modi on a special edition of the Indian leader’s regular radio program that will air on state broadcaster All India Radio on Jan. 27. The Indian Prime Minister broke the news of the show himself using his Twitter feed:

This month’s 'Mann Ki Baat' episode will be a special one, where our Republic Day guest @BarackObama & I will share our thoughts together. — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 22, 2015

And the state broadcaster prepared a special poster:

Prez Obama & PM Modi on next episode of #MannKiBaat on All India Radio on 27th Jan, 2015. #ObamaModiOnAIR pic.twitter.com/Nktz9etXtZ — All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) January 23, 2015

See The History of US—India Relations in 12 Photos

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Countering China, Obama Backs India for U.N. Council

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Yardley

• Nov. 8, 2010

NEW DELHI — By endorsing India for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, President Obama on Monday signaled the United States’ intention to create a deeper partnership of the world’s two largest democracies that would expand commercial ties and check the influence of an increasingly assertive China.

Mr. Obama’s announcement, made during a nationally televised address to the Indian Parliament, came at the end of a three-day visit to India that won high marks from an Indian political establishment once uncertain of the president’s commitment to the relationship. Even as stark differences remained between the countries on a range of tough issues, including Pakistan, trade policy, climate change and, to some degree, Iran, Mr. Obama spoke of India as an “indispensable” partner for the coming century.

“In Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging,” he said during his speech in Parliament. “India has emerged.”

Mr. Obama’s closer embrace of India prompted a sharp warning from Pakistan, India’s rival and an uncertain ally of the United States in the war in Afghanistan, which criticized the two countries for engaging in “power politics” that lacked a moral foundation.

It is also likely to set off fresh concerns in Beijing, which has had a contentious relationship with India and has expressed alarm at American efforts to tighten alliances with Asian nations wary of China’s rising power.

But warmer ties between the United States and India, in the making for many years, come at a crucial time for Mr. Obama. He and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are headed to South Korea later this week for a meeting of the Group of 20, apparently in agreement on what is expected to be a significant clash between the world’s big powers over the United States Federal Reserve’s plan to boost the American economy by pumping $600 billion into it.

China, Brazil and Germany have sharply criticized the move by the independent Fed, which they see as intended to push down the value of the dollar to boost American exports. Germany’s finance minister equated the move to currency manipulation “with the help of their central bank’s printing presses.”

But at a Monday news conference, Mr. Obama defended the Fed’s move and won backing from Mr. Singh , who spoke about the United States’ critical importance to the global economy.

“Anything that would stimulate the underlying growth and policies of entrepreneurship in the United States would help the cause of global prosperity,” he said.

The good will between Mr. Obama and Mr. Singh, as well as the almost giddy reaction to the president and his wife, Michelle, in the Indian press, lent a glossy sheen to a United States-India relationship that is still evolving.

India remains deeply protective of its sovereignty, while the United States is accustomed to having the upper hand with its foreign partners. On Monday, Mr. Singh emphasized the need for the two countries “to work as equal partners in a strategic relationship.”

“For India, going back to the earliest days since independence, there has always been a very strong attachment to strategic autonomy,” said Teresita C. Schaffer, director of the South Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Americans throw around the word ‘ally’ with gay abandon.”

Mr. Obama arrived in India on Saturday bearing a big gift: his decision to lift longstanding export controls on sensitive technologies, albeit with some of the specifics still unclear. And the president also made several small-bore announcements about new collaborations between the nations on everything from homeland security to education, agriculture and open government.

Many Indian analysts said Mr. Obama had big shoes to fill, given the popularity here of his two predecessors. President George W. Bush is viewed with admiration, largely for his work securing a civil nuclear cooperation pact. And former President Bill Clinton, who in 2000 became the first American president to visit India in two decades, is fondly remembered for his gregarious personality and his own speech in Parliament, credited for reviving the relationship.

The headline moment of the trip was Mr. Obama’s announcement on the United Nations seat, even though the endorsement is seemingly as much symbolic as substantive, given the serious political obstacles that have long stalled efforts to reform membership of the Security Council.

All the major powers have said the post-World War II structure of the Security Council, in which the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China have permanent seats with veto power, should be changed to reflect a different balance of power. But it could take years for any changes to be made, partly because there is no agreement on which countries should be promoted to an enlarged Security Council.

The United States has promised to support a promotion for Japan and now India. China is viewed as far less eager for its Asian neighbors to acquire permanent membership in the Council.

But administration officials and independent analysts emphasized the significance of the president’s political message.

The Obamas in India

View Slide Show ›

Ben Rhodes, a top foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama, said the endorsement was intended to send a strong message “in terms of how we see India on the world stage.” Meanwhile, in Washington, even critics who had blamed Mr. Obama for letting the relationship with India drift reacted with praise — and surprise.

“It’s a bold move — no president has said that before,” said Richard Fontaine, a former adviser to Senator John McCain who wrote a critical report of Mr. Obama’s India policy last month for the Center for New American Security . “It’s a recognition of India’s emergence as a global power and the United States’ desire to be close to India.”

But any outreach to India is bound to cause problems for Mr. Obama in Pakistan. In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry warned that Mr. Obama’s decision would further complicate the process of reforming the Security Council. Pakistan, the ministry said in a statement, hopes the United States “will take a moral view and not base itself on any temporary expediency or exigencies of power politics.”

For Mr. Obama, the Pakistan-India-United States nexus creates a delicate dance. The Obama administration is selling warplanes to Pakistan, a move viewed with suspicion here.

During his three-day visit, the president faced criticism for being too soft on Pakistan; during a question and answer session with college students , one demanded to know why he had not declared Pakistan a “terrorist state.” And even Mr. Singh, standing by the president’s side at a joint news conference Monday, reiterated India’s position that it could not have meaningful talks with Pakistan until it shut down the “terror machine” inside its borders.

But if Mr. Obama’s cautious language on Pakistan provoked initial unease, his speech at Parliament seemed to put the matter to rest when he called on the Pakistani government to eradicate “safe havens” for terrorism groups and prosecute the perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed at least 168 people.

“Indians were keen to listen to two ‘p’ words,” said Rajiv Nayan, a strategic affairs analyst in New Delhi. “Permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council and, second, on Pakistan.”

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.

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Obama Wraps Up Visit To India

Julie McCarthy

After three days, President Obama ended his visit by urging Indians to safeguard the rights of women and of religious freedom.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

We're getting a glimpse of the opportunities and the friction in the relations of the world's two largest democracies. President Obama has finished his trip to India. Each country, the U.S. and India, is a huge market for the other. We will start, though, with the friction. President Obama finished his visit by urging Indians to safeguard the rights of women and of religious freedom. NPR's Julie McCarthy is covering this story from New Delhi. And, Julie, this is interesting, the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, is a self-declared Hindu nationalist in a country with a lot of people who are not Hindus. So what did the president say about religion?

JULIE MCCARTHY, BYLINE: Well, it was this unmistakably strong message to India to preserve the rights of other people to practice whatever religion they want to. It was set in this larger context of what India and the U.S. share in terms of being democracies that threw off colonialism and wrote their own founding documents that look very similar. And the president raised this issue, Steve, of religious tolerance at a time when India is really grappling with religious intolerance, attempts to elevate Hinduism over other minority religions, especially Islam.

Now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not at the address when the president told the audience, which included millions of people on TV, that religion's been used to tap into the darker impulses of men. And he urged Indians to avoid that and to look beyond differences and rejoice in what he called the beauty of every soul.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And nowhere is that more important than India. Nowhere is it going to be more necessary for that foundational value to be upheld. India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith, so long it's not splintered along any lines and is unified as one nation.

MCCARTHY: He said he was addressing himself to the young people, who he said could still change their thinking and rid themselves of stereotypes. And he got a very big round of applause when he talked about women's equality.

INSKEEP: Well, what did the president say about that?

MCCARTHY: Well, you know, he acknowledged that the United States is still trying to give women and girls all the opportunities they deserve and equal treatment. And the president acknowledged that Indian women have shown that they can succeed in every field, including government, where there have been a lot of women leaders. And he said India's young women are part of a new generation standing up. Here's what he had to say.

OBAMA: Here's what we know. We know from experience that nations are more successful when their women are successful. When girls go to school...

OBAMA: ...This is one of the most direct measures of whether a nation is going to develop effectively, is how it treats its women.

INSKEEP: The president, speaking, of course, in a country where there's been a lot of focus on attacks on women. So let me ask you, Julie McCarthy, it's always a delicate thing for a world leader to go abroad and be talking to another country about its domestic issues. Were Indians taking this at all as a lecture from the president?

MCCARTHY: I don't think so, Steve. I think a lot of people share the sort of general, global outrage about the treatment of women - the mistreatment of women that they see in India, which, by the way, must be noted, is a global phenomenon. And I think, as far as the religious question goes, it has caused, internally, upset and unease among a lot of people. So, no, I don't think it would be viewed necessarily as the president being out of bounds or lecturing.

INSKEEP: So it didn't change the tone - the upbeat tone of this visit, then?

MCCARTHY: Well, he did climb on a plane as he left, and Mr. Modi was not in that auditorium. But they did seem to create this perception that the U.S. is elevating India, happy to do so. India is embracing the U.S. and happy to do so. But there is this reality - India is a difficult place to do business, and there's a lot that needs to be done here. Whether U.S. companies, which were a big part of this visit, have the energy and patience to stick with India is a big question. So after all the warm glow fades, have they been able to generate something concrete?

INSKEEP: NPR's Julie McCarthy is in New Delhi. Julie, thanks as always.

MCCARTHY: Thank you.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Barack Obama

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Five Questions (and Answers) About Obama's Trip to India

1. Why did President Obama go to India?

Obama went to India for its Republic Day celebrations. The Indian government invited him to be the chief guest for that commemoration. His January 25-27 visit follows closely on the heels of the September visit to Washington of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who took office in May 2014.

American presidents have visited India in the past—Eisenhower (1959), Nixon (1969), Carter (1978), Clinton (2000), Bush (2006) and Obama (2010) -- but expect to hear repeatedly about two "firsts" with regard to this presidential trip to India:

• This is the first time India has invited an American president to be chief guest at its Republic Day.
• This is the first time an American president will visit India twice while in office.

2. What's this Republic Day? I hear there's a parade.

India's Republic Day (distinct from its Independence Day) marks the anniversary of the date in 1950 when India's constitution went into effect. It was on that day that India became a republic, with a constitution in which its democratic and secular nature was enshrined.

The U.S. Constitution influenced the drafters of this document in part. Obama alluded to the connection when he spoke to India's parliament in November 2010 (another honor not often given to foreign leaders), noting that "we are two strong democracies whose constitutions begin with the same revolutionary words — 'We the people.'"

One aspect of the commemoration of Republic Day is indeed a parade that takes place on January 26 every year. It has both solemn and festive elements. India's fallen and its brave (both military and civilian) are honored. Its diversity and its federalism are celebrated. And, as my Brookings colleague W.P.S. Sidhu has noted, it's a demonstration of both India's soft and hard power.

Personnel from the Indian military, paramilitary and police forces march past, accompanied by military bands. Military equipment is showcased — produced domestically and procured from abroad. This year expect an emphasis on the former, and perhaps a highlighting of equipment acquired from the United States.

It'll be interesting to see whether any equipment from Russia might feature — while India has been diversifying its purchases in recent years, that country remains a key defense supplier to India. On the soft power side, schoolchildren perform dances. There are floats (or tableaux — the term used in India) highlighting India's states and some policy initiatives. There's a riot of color, music and, yes, camels (they are part of the Border Security Force's camel contingent). The parade usually ends with one of its most anticipated moments: daredevils on motorcycles and a fly-past with a tri-color (orange, white and green) smoke-trail.

Some media outlets have described the parade as a communist-style parade, but it pre-dates India-Soviet Cold War bonhomie and it's to Britain rather than the Soviet Union that one might want to look for more of its inspiration. Think some combination of Trooping of the Colour in London, the Inauguration Day parade in Washington and/or the Victory Day parade in Moscow — with Indian touches, of course.

3. Is it a big deal that Obama was invited? Isn't this just "non-essential foreign travel"?

As two long-time South Asia hands and former U.S. diplomats put it , "it is a huge deal." The invitation to be chief guest is one of the most significant honors that India can bestow on any foreign leader. The fact that it was even issued is historical and significant because of what it says about India's world view, its leader's foreign policy approach and the perception of the state of India-U.S. relations.

Commentators have described it as a " watershed" ; as India "exorcis[ing] yet another ghost " and moving past a " psychological barrier ." In the past, even when India-U.S. relations have been healthy and growing, an invitation hadn't been forthcoming.

Even as it has become much closer over the last decade, the relationship with the United States wasn't one Indian policymakers seemed to want to highlight publicly. Many preferred to downplay the relationship; some even wanted to downright hide it. Governments were sensitive about being seen as moving too close to the United States.

This sensitivity won't go away entirely — see the speedy correction from the Indian foreign ministry spokesperson when he referred to the United States as "one of our most friendly allies" and then quickly changed that to "partners" — and India will continue to maintain its other partnerships. But this moment does represent a shift.

This Indian prime minister has shown a willingness to bring the India-U.S. relationship more out into the open. In an interview published a few days before the Indian election results were announced in May, Modi didn't hesitate to use the term "natural allies" to describe the relationship.

During his visit to the United States last year, in an op-ed he outlined why he believed this relationship was important. He stressed that the United States was India's "natural global partner" and that "India and the U.S. have a fundamental stake in each other's success." The Republic Day overture is the latest manifestation of this openness. State-run television and radio carry the ceremony live, and India's many private news channels will also have days of live coverage related to the president's visit.

The Obama administration recognizes the significance of the invitation and the moment (hence the acceptance of the invitation), as does Congress, which speedily confirmed Richard Verma as ambassador to India in time for the visit.

Some have wondered about the timing of the visit, i.e., why the president is taking off for India a few days after the State of the Union address, when they say he should focus domestically. Given that the Republic Day date is fixed, there was not much Washington could do about the timing of the trip.

Turning down an invitation wouldn't have just been a missed opportunity, but probably would have set back the United States relationship with India. Moreover, rather than Obama's attendance, it would have been his absence that would have elicited criticism from Republican quarters.

When it comes to India, the complaint of many in the GOP hasn't been that Obama has done too much, but the opposite—that he should think bigger, do more. Senator John McCain, now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said as much in September.

This is why despite the timing not perhaps being ideal — the Obama administration might have wanted to plan a return visit later in his second term — the president made the decision to go to India. This won't go unnoticed in India, particularly by Modi.

It'll definitely be a contrast to Russian President Putin's 23-hour, 15-minute dash to India—despite the Indian prime minister's request to him to spend more than a day in India.

4. So, was it all about the optics?

Firstly, optics do matter. Symbolism and substance aren't mutually exclusive — the former can indeed facilitate the latter. This has definitely been the case in India-U.S. relations in the past. This trip, in particular, gives the United States and India an opportunity to feature and celebrate what they share: democracy and diversity.

We will also see personal touches, highlighting the relationship between the two countries and the leaders. The Indian media has been reporting that the prime minister is looking to make some special gestures, not least to convey his appreciation for the welcome he received in Washington and to reciprocate.

But, while this trip is optics-heavy — if nothing else, because the parade and the Taj Mahal give shutterbugs ample fodder — there is also substance. Some of this will be evident; some of it will take place behind the scenes.

The timing of this visit — in terms of how soon it comes after Modi's visit to the United States in September — has presented both a challenge and an opportunity for those who "work" the relationship. In terms of opportunity, with this summit, the leaders can build on the momentum generated from their first one.

As an action-forcing event, it's made the two bureaucracies focus on the relationship at a time when both governments are grappling with other foreign and domestic priorities. They've indeed already moved on a number of commitments made during the September summit.

This visit is also a chance for the two leaders to get to know each further and continue to establish a personal relationship that could pave the way for a smoother ride ahead and especially be crucial in times of crisis or difficulties. It also gives Obama the opportunity to engage with other key stakeholders in the relationship, especially the business community and the Indian public.

However, given that this visit comes less than four months after the last one — months that haven't exactly been quiet for either Delhi or Washington — it has also posed a challenge in terms of getting significant movement on the substance side and reaching more concrete agreements. Nonetheless, the two governments have been working overtime to make progress in key areas.

On the functional side, defense cooperation will feature , with the potential renewal of the defense framework agreement on the table (the previous one was signed in 2005), as well as some progress on co-production and co-development projects under the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative.

Economic ties — trade, investment (especially in infrastructure ) — is a key theme , especially with Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and several business leaders also traveling to India. Half a day has been devoted to the president and prime minister meeting with private sector leaders from both countries.

Climate change and clean energy are other focus areas. While a deal as ambitious as the China-U.S. agreement is not expected (in recent months, India has indeed been emphasizing that it cannot be clubbed together with China), there might be some movement on this front. There is also expectation that there will be announcements related to the two countries' Partnership to Advance Clean Energy , perhaps on the technology and investment front.

Both sides have been working toward operationalizing their nuclear energy cooperation agreement, but as yet it's not clear whether they will find a way out of the impasse in time for the summit (or, if the proposed solution will be feasible). Counterterrorism cooperation and homeland security are also likely to be discussed—though these are issues where details might not be too forthcoming.

Related to this, the two sides will discuss the situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan , as well as the Middle East (including Iran and ISIL). The consultations on regional issues are likely not just to focus on India's west, but also on its east — where they have identified stability in the Asia-Pacific as a shared interest.

There are indeed a host of other areas in which the two countries cooperate and if there's a joint statement, we'll get more details on related progress on bilateral, regional and global issues. Overall, there will be "deliverables," but it's not clear that there will be what the Indian media calls "big-ticket announcements."

It will be interesting to see if they issue a roadmap, laying out the agenda ahead for the relationship. On the whole, both governments have been actively managing expectations. But with two leaders who have surprised observers of this relationship before, there will likely be unexpected things to write and comment about — whether those will be on substance or symbolism.

5. What's in it for the United States and India? What's in it for Obama and Modi?

Democratic and Republican administrations over the last decade and a half have indicated support for India, stressing that strengthening relations with that country is in U.S. interests. Hence, then national security adviser Tom Donilon put it bluntly in 2013, "We don't just accept India's rise, we fervently support it."

The American investment in India has been predicated on at least three assumptions. For some, it has been the idea of India that has been important — a diverse, developing democracy that could be a partner. For others, India's economic potential — as a market and as a source of investment and talent — has been what makes it attractive. For yet others, it has been India's strategic potential, especially as a balance against (or contrast to) China.

For Obama, this trip offers a way to consolidate India-U.S. relations. A strong, economically rising India and a close, stable relationship with it can help his domestic objectives (including economic ones), his rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, as well as his global goals. It can also be a key legacy issue for him: leaving his successor a transformed relationship with India.

For Modi, this relationship offers both strategic and political benefits. He has promised his people a strong, secure, prosperous, inclusive India that will be respected on the world stage. The Modi government sees the United States as playing a crucial role in helping them deliver on this promise. Thus, the prime minister has clearly stated that he sees the United States as "a principal partner in the realization of India's rise."

And, bucking some in his own base, he has taken the relationship he found that the previous government had established with the United States and has run with it — speedily. This visit provides an opportunity to move it forward significantly, to enhance Indian interests, and for Modi to strengthen his position at home and his image abroad.

Crucially, however, both leaders will have to deliver — domestically and in terms of the relationship. If not, there's a danger that disillusionment and drift will again set in. Differences might also crop up on issues like trade and climate change or countries like Pakistan, Russia and Iran that will need to be handled with care.

Tanvi Madan is a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution , and director of The India Project . This article first appeared on the Brookings Institution website. Follow Madan on Twitter @tanvi_madan

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Obama makes first visit to Indian reservation as president

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CANNON BALL, N.D. — Hours after adjourning a tense meeting about the Iraq crisis, President Obama was on the ancestral lands of Chief Sitting Bull, taking part in a celebration to honor American Indians who have served in America’s foreign wars.

On a plain next to the Missouri River, dancers and drummers from the Sioux and other tribes, encircled by U.S. flags, created a pulsing swirl of color and noise as Obama and his wife, Michelle, nodded in time to the music.

In his first visit to an Indian reservation as president, Obama told the raucous crowd of 1,800 people that he had delivered on his promise as a presidential candidate in 2008 to improve relations between the government and the nation’s Indian tribes.

“There’s no denying that for some Americans, the deck’s been stacked against them, sometimes for generations, and that’s been true of many Native Americans,” the president said. “But if we’re working together, we can make things better.”

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Obama announced a series of modest education initiatives to improve schools for Indian children. Before the flag ceremony, the Obamas met with high-school students at a school on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to hear about the pressures they face growing up.

Tribal leaders praised Obama and presented him with a ceremonial blanket with an eight-point red, white and blue star.

“No other president comes close to the honesty and compassion he has shown for our tribal nations,” said David Archambault II, one of the leaders.

It was a rare respite for a president lurching from crisis to crisis. Obama tried out a few words in the Lakota language and held children during the farewell ceremony.

But he also encountered pressure on a familiar front as some of the leaders and some protesters urged him to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and other oil-sand pipelines, which they say would devastate their land, water, climate and treaty rights.

“Keystone is a death warrant for our people,” Bryan Brewer, a leader of the Oglala Sioux tribe, said in a statement. “President Obama must reject this pipeline and protect our sacred land and water.”

Obama is the fourth sitting president to visit an Indian reservation and the first to make such a trip since Bill Clinton in 1999. As a candidate in 2008, Obama courted the votes of Indians and visited the Crow Nation in Montana, where he was given an Indian name, Black Eagle.

But this long-planned visit was shadowed by the deepening crisis in Iraq. Some commentators questioned why Obama had gone ahead with the four-day trip, which includes a getaway with his wife in Palm Springs, Calif., at a time he is weighing whether to return U.S. warplanes to combat in Iraq.

Administration officials insisted the president could keep an eye on the crisis from the road. They said he was in touch with his national-security staff and could call foreign leaders or consult members of Congress from North Dakota or California.

Officials also said Obama did not want to stand up American Indian leaders.

“The president discussed making a trip to Indian country during the campaign,” said the White House deputy press secretary, Josh Earnest, “so this is making good on an important promise.”

Obama will attend a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Saturday morning before delivering the commencement address at the University of California, Irvine, marking the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the UC Irvine campus by President Lyndon Johnson.

Material from the McClatchy Washington Bureau is included in this report.

Trip to Mumbai

By FactCheck.org

Posted on November 3, 2010

Q: Is President Obama’s trip to India going to cost $200 million per day?

A: This highly doubtful claim originated with one Indian news agency quoting an anonymous source in Mumbai. The White House says it is "wildly exaggerated," and there’s no evidence to support such a huge figure.

FULL QUESTION

There are reports all over that Obama’s India trip will cost $200 million per day. I haven’t been able to find a credible rebuttal to this but I can’t believe it could be true.

FULL ANSWER

This story has spread rapidly among the president’s critics, but there is simply no evidence to support it. And common sense should lead anyone to doubt it. For example, the entire U.S. war effort in Afghanistan currently costs less than that — about $5.7 billion per month, according to the Congressional Research Service , or roughly $190 million per day. How could a peaceful state visit cost more than a war?

What else can you get for $200 million? Try the New Jersey Nets basketball team or possibly the Hope diamond — if only the Smithsonian were selling it .

The hard-to-swallow claim originated with a Nov. 2 Press Trust of India article quoting an unnamed "top official" in the government of Maharashtra (one of India’s states). The source was quoted as saying that Obama’s upcoming trip to Mumbai will cost $200 million per day for security and living arrangements, among other things. The story claimed that the president would be accompanied by about 3,000 people, including Secret Service agents, government officials and journalists, and will stay at the Taj Mahal Hotel — the scene of a 2008 terrorist attack .

We find stories based on anonymous sources always deserve special caution, especially when they come from only one news organization. In this case, the anonymous official is not even in the U.S. government, and any information about costs would necessarily have come second-hand at best, an added reason for caution.

Nevertheless, the story was widely repeated without any additional reporting. Soon after the article was released, The Drudge Report — a news aggregation website — linked to the Press Trust of Indi a article, with the headline "REPORT: US to spend $200 million per day on Obama’s Mumbai visit…" Later that day, Rush Limbaugh claimed on his radio show that "Five hundred seven rooms at the Taj Mahal, 40 airplanes, $200 million a day this nation will spend on Obama’s trip to India." He repeats the "$200 million a day" claim several times throughout the show without specifying its source.

The allegation has generated a great deal of Internet discourse over the past few days, including a Washington Times post that claims Obama’s entourage on the trip "will spend enough to bankrupt a small nation." According to the Economic Times and The Daily Mail , Obama will take over the entire 570-room Taj Mahal Hotel for the trip. A Google search for the exact words of the original Press Trust article returned about 11,000 results. And we received about two dozen queries about it.

The White House is always reluctant to discuss cost figures about presidential trips, since the bulk of the expense is for Secret Service security. Not this time. The White House press office, which said it had been flooded with queries, gave us the following statement:

Matt Lehrich, White House Office of Media Affairs : The numbers reported in this article have no basis in reality. Due to security concerns, we are unable to outline details associated with security procedures and costs, but it’s safe to say these numbers are wildly inflated.

It is always costly to move a U.S. president around the world. And in this case, the president is attending a G-20 meeting and will be accompanied by several cabinet officials. But given the dubious source of this assertion, the fact that the claimed cost exceeds the cost of a war, the flat denial by the White House and the lack of any evidence to support the claim, we’ll classify this one as false.

–Lara Seligman

Update, Nov. 4: Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota repeated the claim Nov. 3 on CNN’s " Anderson Cooper 360 ," attacking Obama for "over-the-top spending." When Cooper countered that "no one really knows the cost, because for security reasons they don’t disclose the cost," Bachmann responded, “Well these are the numbers that have been coming out in the press."

On Nov. 4, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell called the story "absolutely absurd," because it had claimed that the U.S. Navy was sending 34 warships to the coast off Mumbai as part of the president’s visit:

Morrell, Nov. 4: I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy — some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier — in support of the president’s trip to Asia. … That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.

ABC News reported that 34 ships would actually amount to nearly 12 percent of the 288 in the Navy’s fleet, not 10 percent.

Later the same day, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said during his regular press briefing that the $200 million per day estimate is incorrect.

Gibbs, Nov 4: Well, we have set the record straight with you guys. I’m not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president. Costs are comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad.  

So how much did those trips cost? In the case of some Clinton trips, we have figures from a 1999 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office — now called the Government Accountability Office. The GAO said that Clinton’s trips to Africa, Chile and China in 1998 cost at least $42.8 million, $10.5 million and $18.8 million, respectively — not counting the still-classified cost of providing Secret Service protection.

In Africa, Clinton was accompanied by about 1,300 individuals — not including members of the Secret Service — representing the White House, the Department of Defense and other federal agencies. The president visited six countries in 12 days, which means the trip cost $3.6 million per day.

Clinton made the five-day Chile trip in order to attend the second Summit of the Americas — a meeting of 34 heads of state or governments from countries in the Americas — and to hold meetings with the president of Chile. About 600 individuals accompanied the president on the trip, which we calculated would have cost $2.1 million per day.

When Clinton visited China to conduct talks with the president of China, he brought along about 500 individuals. The trip lasted nine days, which works out to a little less than $2.1 million per day.

The total cost including Secret Service protection would of course be somewhat higher, but even doubling or tripling those figures and adding in an adjustment for inflation would not produce anything close to the figure given by the Indian news article for Obama’s trip.

Schmelzer, Paul. " Using inaccurate figure, Bachmann calls Obama’s India trip ‘massive overspending .’" The Minnesota Independent. 4 Nov 2010.

Martinez, Luis " Pentagon Dismisses Reports of 34 Warships for Obama Trip Security " ABC News. 4 Nov 2010.

General Accounting Office. " Costs and Accounting For the President’s 1998 Trips to Africa, Chile, and China ." 21 Sept 1999.

Congressional Research Service. " The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11. " 2 Sep 2010.

Eichelberger, Curtis. " Prokhorov’s $200 Million Purchase of Nets Gets NBA Approval ." Bloomberg Business Week. 12 May 2010.

" Mystery of the Hope Diamond. " Press release. Smithsonian Channel.25 Oct 2010.

Press Trust of India. " US to spend $200 mn a day on Obama’s Mumbai visit ." NDTV.com. 2 Nov 2010.

Sengupta, Somini. " At Least 100 Dead in India Terror Attacks. " New York Times. 26 Nov 2008.

The Drudge Report . 2 November 2010, accessed 3 Nov 2010.

Stack of Stuff Quick Hits Page . The Rush Limbaugh Show. 2 Nov 2010, accessed 3 Nov 2010.

Knight, Robert. " Pulling back the curtain on Obama’s audacity ." The Washington Times. 29 Oct 2010.

Mumbai Mirror. " Barack and Michelle’s Mumbai darshan plans ." The Economic Times. 23 Oct 2010.

White, James. "’ $200m-a-day’ cost of Barack Obama’s trip to India will be picked up by U.S. taxpayers ." The Daily Mail. 2 Nov 2010.

Barack Obama: Memoir praises India opposition leaders

• Published 17 November 2020

Former US president Barack Obama's memoirs have already caused a minor stir in India - his frank, unflattering description of Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the main opposition Congress party incensed the latter's supporters and amused his detractors.

A Promised Land, the first volume of Mr Obama's account of his political career which released on Tuesday, is a vivid and racy read. In it, he spends some 1,400 words writing of his first visit to India in November 2010 when the now-opposition Congress party was in power - and his impressions of then prime minister Manmohan Singh and party president Sonia Gandhi.

On Manmohan Singh

Mr Obama recalls that when he met Manmohan Singh, he had told him that he feared "rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of Hindu nationalist BJP", the main opposition party at the time.

Mr Singh had resisted calls to retaliate against Pakistan after gunmen attacked the financial capital Mumbai leaving 166 dead. But "this restraint had cost him politically," Mr Obama writes.

"In uncertain times, Mr President, 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", Mr Singh had told him.

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Barack Obama tells the BBC about the "crazy conspiracies" and "truth decay" in US politics

Mr Obama agreed, recalling a conversation he had with the Czech Republic's first president after the Velvet Revolution, Vaclav Havel, during a visit to Prague "and his warning about the rising tide of illiberalism in Europe".

"If globalisation and historic economic crisis were fuelling these trends in relatively wealthy nations - If I was seeing it even in the United States with the Tea Party - how could India be immune?" Mr Obama writes.

During a dinner party hosted by Mr Singh on Mr Obama's first evening in Delhi, Mr Singh "spoke openly about the clouds he saw on the horizon".

Mr Singh mentioned the slowing economy - the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States had developed into a full-blown global crash by this point.

The Indian prime minister, Mr Obama writes, was also concerned about the continuing tensions with nuclear-armed rival and neighbour Pakistan.

"Then there was the problem of Pakistan, and its continuing failure to work with India to investigate the 2008 terrorist attacks on hotels and other sites in Mumbai had significantly increased tensions between the two countries, in part because Lashkar-e-Taiba , the terrorist organisation responsible, was believed to have links to Pakistan's intelligence service."

He describes Mr Singh as the "chief architect of India's economic transformation" and "wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest".

Mr Singh was 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", Mr Obama observes.

"While he would 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," Mr Obama writes.

On Sonia Gandhi

Mr Obama described Sonia Gandhi, the then president of the Congress party, "as a striking woman in her sixties, dressed in a traditional sari, with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence".

"That she - a former stay-at-home mother of European descent - had emerged from her grief after her husband was killed by a Sri Lankan separatist's suicide bomb in 1991 to become a leading national politician testified to the enduring power of the family dynasty," he writes.

Italian-born Sonia Gandhi's husband Rajiv Gandhi who was once prime minister, was killed by a suicide bomber at a rally in Tamil Nadu state in 1991.

At a dinner, Mr Obama writes, Ms Gandhi listened more than she spoke, "careful to defer to [Mr] Singh when policy matters came up, and often steered the conversation toward her son".

"It became clear to me, though, that her power was attributable to a shrewd and forceful intelligence."

On Rahul Gandhi

Mr Obama said Rahul Gandhi "seemed smart and earnest, his good looks resembling his mother's".

"He offered up his thoughts on the future of progressive politics, occasionally pausing to probe me on the details of my 2008 campaign," Mr Obama writes.

"But there was a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who'd done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject."

(These remarks about Mr Gandhi, which appeared in an early review of the book in the New York Times by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, angered some Congress party supporters, with one party leader saying he had "un-followed" Mr Obama on Twitter in protest.)

On the future of India

Modern day-India, Mr Obama writes, was a "success story, having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals".

But despite the thriving democracy and the freer economy, India still "bore little resemblance to the egalitarian, peaceful, and sustainable society Gandhi had envisioned". Inequality was rife, and violence "remained an all-too-pervasive part of Indian life".

Obama: One election won't stop US 'truth decay'

Mr Obama writes that after leaving Mr Singh's residence on that November evening he wondered what would happen when the then 78-year-old prime minister left office.

"Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Party's dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP?" he wonders.

"Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn't Singh's fault. He had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post-Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net.

"Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic, multi-religious societies like India and the United States."

But Mr Obama also found himself "asking whether those impulses - of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others - were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain.

"For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people's fears and resentments."

Mr Obama's question was answered in 2014, when Narendra Modi led the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a sweeping victory.

Mr Obama visited again in 2015 when Mr Modi was prime minister , becoming the first US president to visit India twice while in office.

But the first half of the former president's memoirs ends with the death of Osama Bin Laden in 2011.

The second part is likely to include his impressions of Mr Modi.

Mr Obama's trip ended with a lavish state dinner at the residence of Indian President Pratibha Patil in Delhi

More on this story

• Published 15 November 2020

Obama holds talks with Indian PM

• Published 8 November 2010

US and India put accent on shared values

Obama hails ties between India and US

• Published 9 November 2010

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Obama remarks on India’s treatment of Muslims ‘hypocritical’ – minister

Indian finance minister hits out after former US president said Modi government should protect rights of Muslims

India’s finance minister has derided comments by the former US president Barack Obama that Narendra Modi’s government should protect the rights of minority Muslims, accusing Obama of being hypocritical.

During the Indian prime minister’s state visit to the US last week, Obama told CNN that the issue of the “ protection of the Muslim minority in a majority-Hindu India” would be worth raising in Modi’s meeting with the US president, Joe Biden.

Obama said that without such protection there was “a strong possibility that India at some point starts pulling apart“.

The Indian finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, said she was shocked Obama had made such remarks when Modi was visiting the US aiming to deepen relations.

“He was commenting on Indian Muslims … having bombed Muslim-majority countries from Syria to Yemen … during his presidency,” Sitharaman told a press conference on Sunday. “Why would anyone listen to any allegations from such people?“

The US state department has raised concerns over treatment of Muslims and other religious minorities in India under Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. The Indian government says it treats all citizens equally.

Biden said he discussed human rights and other democratic values with Modi during their talks in the White House.

Modi, at a press conference with Biden last week, denied any discrimination against minorities under his government.

• Barack Obama
• Narendra Modi
• South and central Asia

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U.S. Fixation on Nuclear Deal Let Iran Loose on the Middle East

Washington’s shortsighted policies enabled tehran and its proxies to destabilize the region., israel-hamas war.

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The United States has dropped the ball on Iran. Had Washington come up with a comprehensive strategy to address Tehran’s destabilizing role in the Middle East, the spreading conflict between Iran and its proxies on the one side and Israel and its allies on the other might have been prevented. Today’s escalating conflict in the Middle East—which on April 13 saw the first-ever direct attack on Israel by Iran—is not least the result of an inconsistent, shortsighted, and overly compartmentalized U.S. policy toward Iran for more than a decade.

Since the first administration of President Barack Obama, Washington has focused its attention almost entirely on Iran’s nuclear program, all but overlooking its other activities—including its interventions across the region. Already during Obama’s campaign for his first term in 2008, he promised to make a nuclear deal with Iran his top priority for the Middle East, which he duly sought to implement once in office.

Early in the process, there was a clear imbalance between Washington’s perception and Tehran’s. Washington thought that engaging Iran on the nuclear file would curb the latter’s destabilizing potential in the region, and this assumption motivated the signing of an initial nuclear agreement with Iran in 2013. But Iran celebrated the agreement as a political victory and otherwise carried on. Despite this, the Obama administration pressed on in pursuit of a wider nuclear deal, and in 2015 managed to secure the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

As the Obama administration was negotiating its deals, two significant developments took place in Iran that failed to set off any kind of rethink in Washington. The first was the Green Movement , a nationwide wave of protests against the manipulated 2009 election that gave Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term. The Iranian authorities crushed the movement with sheer violence. In 2011, popular protests also erupted in Syria as part of the Arab Spring. Iran was quick to deploy its advisors to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crush the protests , turning a peaceful uprising into a long and bloody war that continues to this day .

During this time, Iran was also developing its ballistic missile program. But none of these developments shifted Washington’s focus away from the objective of the nuclear deal. Once again, U.S. and Iranian perceptions varied greatly.

Washington’s logic was that nuclear enrichment was the greatest threat that Iran was posing in the Middle East—and the U.S. side theorized that cooperation on this issue, in return for lifting sanctions, would build trust. This trust, according to Washington, would then be the basis upon which Iran could be engaged on other issues such as its missile program and its interventions in the Middle East. This misplaced hope not only failed to account for Iranian political realities, but it was also shortsighted in allowing Iran to expand both its missile program and regional interventions.

This myopic fixation of the Obama years is today repeated by the Biden administration, which has been similarly focused on the nuclear deal while largely ignoring Iran’s other destabilizing activities.

But even the administration of former President Donald Trump did not deviate much from the path set by Obama and now followed by President Joe Biden. In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and announced the start of a so-called maximum pressure campaign toward Iran. Yet his administration did not come up with any plan for dealing with the ballistic missile program or regional interventions—despite Iran’s activities in Syria having become more extensive than they were during Obama’s time in office.

Iran never fully abided by the terms of the JCPOA, but the U.S. withdrawal from the deal gave Tehran the opportunity to publicly blame Washington, increasing Iran’s political capital among its supporters. And although Trump used the term “maximum pressure” to describe his Iran strategy, the reality was that the measures taken by Washington were actually not very maximal. They amounted to the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—a branch of the Iranian military—as a terrorist organization in 2019, the assassination of IRGC elite commander Qassem Suleimani in 2020, and the imposition of additional sanctions.

The Trump administration’s measures did not cause Iran to modify its behavior. If anything, Iran became more emboldened. The terrorist designation did little to curb the IRGC’s financial transactions because the group does not rely on international banking networks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that the United States implemented the designation at his “request” only served to support Iran’s narrative that it was defying victimization by its enemies. Suleimani’s assassination did not cause the IRGC to crumble, and it carried on its destabilizing activities. And while Iran did suffer financially from sanctions, they have not been sufficient to cause a change in the regime’s behavior.

Iran also benefited from the lukewarm reaction of the Trump administration to the attacks orchestrated by Iran and its proxies against U.S. targets in the Middle East. Washington blamed Tehran for the 2019 attack by Yemen’s Houthis on a critical Aramco oil facility in Saudi Arabia—but it never came up with a robust policy toward Yemen itself. That failure is now vividly playing out in the context of the Israel-Hamas war.

In the eyes of Tehran, Washington also lost credibility due to its lack of political and military pushback. When IRGC speedboats harassed U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf in 2020, the United States chose not to respond. Later that year, the Trump administration failed in its bid to extend a U.N. arms embargo on Iran, which expired in October 2020; instead, Washington ended up imposing this embargo unilaterally .

Iran saw this scenario as confirming the United States’ diplomatic isolation. When Washington imposed more sanctions on Tehran that same year, the latter’s response was to increase nuclear enrichment.

Iran also benefited from U.S. inattention to the former’s ongoing regional interventions, which continued across the administrations of Obama, Trump, and Biden. This inattention allowed the Houthis to consolidate their position in Yemen, helped the Assad regime stay in power, and enabled Hezbollah to become the most powerful political actor in Lebanon. Other Iran-backed armed groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, also profited from this situation, acquiring more weapons, funding, and training from Iran.

After 15 years of half-baked, myopic U.S. policies toward Iran, it should not come as a surprise that the Middle East is now at war—started on Oct. 7, 2023, by an Iran-backed armed group, Hamas, whose escalatory aggressiveness is, to no small extent, the result of a failed U.S. strategy toward Iran.

Iran’s apparent resilience is not simply the product of its own strength, but also largely a consequence of U.S. strategic ineptitude. In other words, U.S. behavior has aided Iran’s ability to act as a destabilizing force in the Middle East.

If there is a silver lining to the events since October, it is that the conflict has shown Iran to be isolated and vulnerable. When Iran attacked Israel, the latter’s Western allies and Arab partners actively aided in its defense. Iran, for all its network of proxies , lacks such a robust defense network.

This could be a golden opportunity for the United States to shift gears in its handling of Iran. A new strategy should include stronger engagement with Washington’s regional allies to create a viable security framework for the Middle East, taking the lead on the Syrian and Yemeni peace processes, and resurrecting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in a way that includes and addresses Iran’s role.

Unfortunately, there are still no signs that the United States is prepared to craft a comprehensive Iran policy that seriously addresses Tehran’s threat to regional stability. U.S. policy on Iran has echoes of its Syria policy, through which the Obama administration’s inaction led to horrific consequences.

As long as the United States maintains a similarly passive stance on Iran, the Middle East will continue to reel from Tehran’s destabilizing actions.

Lina Khatib is the director of the University of London’s SOAS Middle East Institute and an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program, where she was previously a director. Twitter:  @LinaKhatibUK

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