Senorita...there's a lot Barack Obama could have told us about us

By AAKAR PATEL

In 1959, when he was only 30 but already famous, Martin Luther King visited India. He reported the visit in the essay 'My visit to the land of Gandhi', of whom King writes that "by any standard of measurement, he is one of the half dozen greatest men in history". Not all of King's clear-eyed observations on that 38-day trip will warm Indians, though he is unrelentingly sympathetic. It is not difficult to see why this brilliant man was the inspiration for Barack Obama, who is himself observant and curious and one of the most intellectual leaders produced by the 21st century .

We must wait for his next book to learn what Obama made of India. Some things we will never officially know. For instance, it is likely that he isn't excited by Indian cuisine (avoided tactfully by saying he had acid reflux and couldn't eat any spicy food at all). What about the rest of it? Let's try and put ourselves in the mind of the president.

The first thing that would have struck him at the Republic Day parade is our fierce nationalism. In Indian languages, nationalism is not a negative word. Rashtrawad is a good word, a positive feeling, in our culture. The nationalist sentiment is not tinged with menace as it is in Europe, because of the 20th century experience. Republic Day is when the state responds to the citizenry's militaristic and muscular nationalism.

Attending it, Obama would have observed the chasm between the citizen, for whom that fancy parade was presumably held, and the powerful. The physical separation and unapproachability of India's privileged from its many . The gods of business and of media queueing up later as schoolchildren to shake his hand and mumble some greeting reinforced this.

Amid the talk of US-India military cooperation, the president would have noticed that India's is an army whose mercenary origins are revealed in its glittering 19th century uniforms. And also in the names, war cries and sometimes race of its regiments. He would have liked the deliberate promotion of the military's women (a clever intervention from Prime Minister Narendra Modi) in the parade, something that Obama said he appreciated. So why did he later choose to highlight the poor treatment of women in India? Perhaps the fact that outside the parades, India's military has told a court it was forced to discriminate against women because “the bulk of the army's Junior Commissioned Officers and other ranks hail from rural India, who are not yet ready to accept a woman as their leader in combat situations“.

I doubt Obama was impressed by the primitive and two-dimensional identities imposed on our states, replete with cultural cliches -dancing, unworried Goans, northeasterners in tribal attire, devout Maharashtrians off to Pandharpur -as represented on the tableaux. The newspapers would have revealed to him the slicing off of states -no Bengal, no Bihar -to accommodate Modi projects like Make in India and Jan Dhan Yojana.

He would have noticed the hounding of vicepresident Ansari over the anthem business. There's something singularly off-putting about corpulent old civilians flashing military salutes. It was apparently Reagan, the first American president to salute the two guards as he stepped off the Marine One chopper on the White House lawns, who set the modern trend.Obama was once attacked as unpatriotic for not putting his palm across his chest during the national anthem and would have sympathized with Ansari.

In the PM, he most likely saw someone hardworking and enthusiastic, who as a host was warm and perhaps overly familiar physically . However, what would Obama, a frugal individual who wears a cheap watch and famously re-soles his shoes, have made of that suit advertising its master on its pinstripes?
This is not difficult to imagine. He was repelled, but probably coldly set the observation of Modi's narcis sism aside to be used as a lever in the future.