World leaders from former President Barack Obama to German Chancellor Angela Merkel have written about their interactions with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in their memoirs. Obama talked about Singh’s role in transforming India into a market-based Indian economy through the liberalization efforts of 1991, while Merkel talked about how Singh helped her in developing economies.
Obama in the memoir A Promised Land
Crediting Singh with “modernizing his nation’s economy,” Obama described Singh as a gentle, soft-spoken economist with a “white beard and turban” that was a mark of his Sikhism but gave him the wind in Western eyes. A holy man”.
During his tenure as Treasury Secretary in the 1990s, Obama wrote, Singh lifted millions of people out of poverty.
“During his tenure as Prime Minister, I have found Singh to be intelligent, thoughtful and honest.”
Reflecting on Singh’s role in transforming India into a market-based Indian economy, Obama wrote: “The transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s unleashed the extraordinary entrepreneurial talent of the Indian people—which led to soaring growth rates, a boom. a high-tech sector, and an ever-expanding middle class.”
As the chief architect of India’s economic transformation, Obama writes, Singh “seemed an apt symbol of this progress: a member of the small, often persecuted Sikh religious minority who had risen to the highest office in the land, and a self-made man not by appealing to his own aspirations but by bringing about a higher standard of living and a better Influencing a technocrat who wins public trust by maintaining an earned reputation is not corrupt.”
Of his personal relationship with the former prime minister, Obama wrote: “Singh and I developed a warm and fruitful relationship. Although he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to stray too far from an Indian bureaucracy historically suspicious of American intentions, our times confirmed my initial impressions of him as a man of unusual intelligence and decency; And during my visit to the capital, New Delhi, we signed agreements to strengthen U.S. cooperation in counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade.”
Angela Merkel: Freedom
Merkel, who was Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021, wrote in Freedom: Memoirs (1954-2021) that she first met Singh in April 2006 when they formally visited an international trade fair. Hannover Messe was opened.
She wrote that Singh’s “primary aim was to improve the living standards of two-thirds of India’s 1.2 billion people living in rural areas”.
“That’s 800 million people, ten times the total population of Germany. In my conversations with him, I understood very well the ambivalence of the emerging countries towards us, the rich countries,” she wrote. “From his point of view, we expected them to take a great interest in our problems, but we did not. Be prepared to offer them the same courtesy. I could see his point and began to study more closely the challenges facing developing countries.
She added that Singh told her “about the cultural diversity of a subcontinental country with a history of more than five thousand years”.
Merkel also writes about Singh’s successor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Modi’s focus was also on improving the standard of living of Indians, especially for the rural population. He promoted economic growth, especially by tackling the myriad bureaucratic obstacles lurking everywhere. He appointed an employee in his office as a contact person for companies that were having difficulties with their projects. “This gave rise to the so-called fast track for investment. India’s economy grew by 6 to 7 percent in a few years,” she wrote.
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