His eyes shone with respect for the Mahatma when Barack Obama entered Rajghat, and he spontaneously described Gandhiji’s memorial as “very simple and very beautiful”.
“One could feel that it [what he said] was coming out straight from his heart,” Rajnish Kumar, secretary of the Rajghat Samadhi Committee, told DNA.
Obama with wife Michelle reached Rajghat at around 10:15 am on Monday and spent about 20 minutes there. “The couple bowed heads and stood in silence for a minute. They took off shoes before entering the memorial. He went in with just his socks on, unlike other VIPs who wear slippers after taking off shoes,” Kumar said.
Obama placed a wreath of white flowers, which had a ribbon with stripes of white blue and red colour signifying US’s national flag, and showered flower petals on the memorial.
Paying glowing tributes to the Father of the Nation, Obama said, “I am mindful that I might not be standing before you today, as president of the United States, had it not been for Gandhi and the message he shared with America and the world,” Obama later said in his 35-minute address to parliament.
Obama explained how generations of Americans were influenced by Gandhiji. “Just as he summoned Indians to seek their destiny, he influenced champions of equality in my own country, including a young Martin Luther King.”
He gifted a stone from the memorial of the US civil rights leader Martin Luther King junior, which is being built in Washington DC.
The stone was set on a small black base, embossed with the presidential seal and Obama’s signature, and was kept in a box covered in gold paper.
