In new memoir, Barack Obama describes modern-day India as success story 'despite bitter feuds within political parties'

The former US president writes that the transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s unleashed the extraordinary entrepreneurial talents of Indians Washington: Former US President Barack Obama has said that modern day India can be counted as a success story in many respects, despite bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and corruption scandals. In many respects, modern-day India is counted as a success story, having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals, Obama writes. As the chief architect of India’s economic transformation, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seemed like a fitting emblem of this progress: a member of the tiny, often persecuted Sikh religious minority who had risen to the highest office in the land, and a self-effacing technocrat who had won people’s trust not by appealing to their passions but by bringing about higher living standards and maintaining a well-earned reputation for not being corrupt, said Obama, who had visited India twice as president in 2010 and 2015. Obama writes Manmohan Singh’s elevation as prime minister, sometimes heralded as a hallmark of the country’s progress in overcoming sectarian divides, was somewhat deceiving.