By Devirupa Mitra
26th September 2014
NEW YORK: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be using the Gandhi connection to establish a rapport during his maiden meeting with US President Barack Obama.
As protocol dictates, Modi will travel to White House bearing gifts for the US leader. But unlike previous Indian gifts which were about Indian crafts, the PM’s present will be related to one of Obama’s idols.
“It is related to Gandhiji and it has been specially commissioned for the US President,” sources told Express.
Modi will arrive in a traffic-gridlocked city on Friday afternoon for the first leg of his US visit to address the UN General Assembly and meet with US CEOs and Indian-Americans.
The PM certainly has a penchant for one-of-a-kind gifts — like two special commemorative edition books on Swami Vivekananda’s travels in Japan that he presented to his Japanese counterpart. His other gift was the Bhagavad Gita.
Obama is not the first world leader with whom Modi has tried to forge a closer link through their interest in Mahatma Gandhi. Modi personally took Chinese President Xi Jinping on a tour of the Sabarmati Ashram, with the latter wearing the Khadi jacket presented by his host.
Modi also gifted books on Gandhiji and a small spinning wheel to Xi. But, perhaps, the most unusual item was the copy of a scroll given to Gandhiji by the Chinese community in Johannesburg in 1908.
Of course, receiving a gift with a Gandhi connection will have special resonance for Obama. The US President had termed the non-violent leader as person he would most like to have dinner with, dead or alive and continues to refer to him in scores of speeches, including in his Nobel prize acceptance speech.
For Obama’s worldview, Gandhi has an exalted position for his inspiration of Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Movement.
Incidentally, Modi will be visiting the Martin Luther King memorial and Gandhi statues in Washington on Sep 30, before he heads for the formal talks in White House.
When former PM Manmohan Singh first met Obama in November 2009, he had presented a “burgundy rug with a foliate motif”, whose estimated value was put at $1200.
Then in 2011, Manmohan gifted a white marble table with inlaid blue and yellow flower, which the US state department protocol office estimated to be around $1375.
In fact, it was former President Pratibha Patil, who gifted Gandhi’s biography by Louis Fischer and a bust to Obama during his 2010 visit.
Interestingly, it was not Obama but to his predecessor in the Oval Office, President George W Bush that Manmohan gifted the books on Gandhiji.
In September 2009, when he met Bush for the last time at the White House, he gave two inscribed books --one on history by his daughter Upinder Singh and another titled “Gandhian Way: Peace, Non-violence and Empowerment”, whose foreword was written by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.
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