.
Times of India also accused Obama "of purposely raising health care costs through Obamacare."
2/15/15, "Indians call Obama 'Sanctimonious'," American Thinker, Richard L. Benkin
"It was too good to be true. India’s Prime Minister and leader of the Indian right, and the most leftist US President in history seemed to be getting along. Then on January 27, the final day of his three-day Indian trip, President Obama spoke to 1,500 people at the iconic Siri Fort, and to the ears of those that heard it, lectured
that “India will succeed so long as it was not splintered along the
lines of religious faith.” The general reaction among Indians was ‘who
does he think he is?’ Religious conflict has been in the forefront here
of late and has been one of the ways opponents have tried to attack
Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The Times of India, about as mainstream as media can get, in a scathing editorial titled, “Papa Don’t Preach,”
ripped Obama for it and for using “his annual National Prayer Breakfast
address to assert that Mahatma Gandhi would have been shocked by acts
of religious intolerance in India” a few days later. “Consider an
equivalent scenario where an Indian prime minister, on a visit to the
US, uses the occasion to speculate on what Martin Luther King Jr would
have thought of the Ferguson shooting last year.” It notes that
US-India relations were marred by “such sanctimoniousness” from both
countries. “Indian leaders have stopped doing it. So should the
Americans.”
.
So
it comes as no surprise that Indians are livid at news that Madison,
Alabama police wrestled a 57-year old Indian national to the ground
leaving him temporarily paralyzed only two weeks after he arrived in the
US to help with his 17-month-old grandchild. According to accounts
accepted by the police and the family, Sureshbhai Patel was out for a
walk when a neighbor called the police to report “a suspicious
character.” Police accosted him, and though Patel clearly gave his
son’s house number, his limited English made communication difficult. That is when the attack occurred.
While
concern for Patel’s recovery is foremost on people’s minds, news shows
and newspapers are focusing on “Obama’s hypocrisy,” playing up every way
we fall short along the very lines Obama chose to emphasize. The
content almost does not matter. The Times article about Patel,
for instance, contained gratuitous information about Alabama’s race
relations history and was accompanied by a sidebar about three Muslim
students being killed at the University of North Carolina. In an editorial the same day, the Times accuses
Obama of purposely raising health care costs, through Obamacare, by
pushing a trade deal with India “that would weaken competition from
generics…
This is not an unintended consequence of an otherwise
well-intentioned policy; it is the explicit goal of US trade policy.”
US-India
relations have not always been good. With a strongly pro-US Prime
Minister who is also a small government capitalist, those relations were
improving exponentially. While it is unlikely that this incident will
derail that, it is not going away soon. Even while I was writing this
article, I saw a television commercial pointedly telling Obama to “stop
lecturing India.” I asked people on the street about it today, and
they were incensed. More than one person asked me if Obama thought he
was the ‘British Raj,” about the harshest thing an Indian can say about a
foreigner.
Was
Obama trying to assuage some of his far left allies or sticking it to
Modi in the same way he treats Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu? Before Modi became Prime Minister, Obama’s team made no
secret of their contempt for him. Either way, there is no place for it
in mature and sensible foreign policy. One would hope the President of
the United States would at least be courteous."
.
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