President Barack Obama spoke to the Indian people about his humble beginnings and about the importance of lifting up the poor as part of the country’s economic ascension.
What he didn’t do was actually see much of India’s poverty.
In his second visit to a country with a history of determining haves and have-nots by the caste system, Obama spent a little more than two days with the haves.
Between stops at palatial government buildings for meetings and dinners, Obama moved about New Delhi in the armored presidential limousine known as the Beast. When he travels in the United States, Obama travels streets that often are lined with local residents, some showing support and others carrying protest signs. Occasionally he even sits in traffic.
In India, police and military personnel kept crowds and traffic at bay, clearing roads that are usually choked with New Delhi’s notorious traffic. Onlookers were sequestered behind barricades as much as a block away on intersecting roads or behind fences on commercial or private property.
No Indians held signs either welcoming the president or protesting his presence as he traveled between the ITC Maurya five-star hotel in the city’s diplomatic enclave and his destinations that included the presidential palace and memorial to Mahatma Gandhi.
On his travels, Obama passed stray dogs and monkeys but no people aside from those detailed to keep him safe.
Obama stayed insulated from the poor in a country where three of five people live on less than $2 per day, zipping by pockets of slums where residents used corrugated metal and tarps as building materials.
India accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s residents without toilets, according to a report released in May by the World Health Organization and Unicef. The country’s 50 percent open-defecation rate compares with 23 percent in Pakistan, 3 percent in Bangladesh and 1 percent in China, the report said.
Tuesday morning before leaving to fly to Saudi Arabia, Obama gave an address billed as remarks to the people of India.
“Right now, in crowded neighborhoods not far from here, a man is driving an auto-rickshaw, or washing somebody else’s clothes, or doing the hard work no one else will do,” he told a crowd of about 1,500 people at Siri Fort Auditorium, a performance venue that hosts art and cultural events.
“A woman is cleaning somebody else’s house. A young man is on a bicycle delivering lunch,” he said. “A little girl is hauling a heavy bucket of water. Their dreams, their hopes, are just as big and beautiful and worthy as ours. And so even as we live in a world of wrenching inequities, we’re also proud to live in countries where even the grandson of cook can become president, even a Dalit can help write a Constitution, and even a tea seller can become prime minister.”
He urged Indians to lift people out of poverty, lauding progress that’s already been made and outlining how agreements he reached this week with Prime Minister Narendra Modi will help achieve that goal.
Obama echoed themes he used in last week’s State of the Union address to the people of the U.S., calling for lifting up middle and lower classes through government policies.
He took care to highlight one interaction he did have with a person in poverty. Obama told the audience about Vishal, now a 16-year-old boy, who the president also met when he was in India in 2010 during his first visit as president.
“His father works as a stone layer, far away, but he sends home what little he makes so Vishal can go to school,” Obama said, saying he’d met the teen’s father when he greeted laborers at Humayun’s Tomb. “Vishal loves math. Mostly, he studies. When he’s not studying, he likes watching kabaddi. And he dreams of someday joining the Indian armed forces.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
