Shiv Sena Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut on Saturday waded in on the controversy over the mention of Rahul Gandhi in Barack Obama’s new book. “A foreign politician cannot give such opinions on Indian political leaders,” Raut said.
In his new book ‘A Promised Land’, former US president Barack Obama made brief mentions of Rahul Gandhi and former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh. According to a book review by the New York Times, Obama wrote that former Congress president Rahul Gandhi “has a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject”.
“A foreign politician cannot give such opinions on Indian political leaders. The subsequent domestic political discourse on Obama’s remark on the Congress leader is distasteful. We won’t say ‘Trump is mad’. How much does Obama know about this nation?” news agency ANI quoted Shiv Sena MP and Saamna editor Sanjay Raut as saying.
Several other Congress leaders also criticised Barack Obama for his remarks on Rahul Gandhi. Congress leader from Bihar, Tariq Anwar said that Gandhi has changed since he briefly met Obama last.