Washington : The then US President Barack Obama used his African-American card to win over Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the last phase of negotiations at the Paris summit in late 2015, where India was the last holdout as its officials were the toughest negotiators, says a book on his presidency.
“When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India,” Obama’s then top foreign policy and national security aide for eight years Ben Rhodes writes in his book ‘The World at It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House’.
Rhodes was Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications. Giving a blob-by-blow account of the last phase of US-India talks on climate change, Rhodes writes that at one point of time in Paris Obama himself entered into a personal conversation with two Indian officials to convince them of the need for India to be part of the deal. But he failed to cut ice with the two Indian negotiators, says the book.
Then he spend nearly an hour with Modi in Paris. Nothing appeared to work till the time Obama played the African-American card, according to the book. Rhodes writes, Obama tried and could not succeed in convincing Indian negotiators.
“We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult,” he writes.
“Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power,” says Rhodes. This was something unprecedented and not part of the protocol. he adds.