Obama had a hard time convincing PM Modi to agree at the Paris summit

President Obama’s then deputy security national security advisor for strategic communications, Ben Rhodes has written the book,’The world at It Is :A Memoir Of the Obama White House’ which is to hit the stands today.In the book, Rhodes writes about the Paris summit, in which during the last phase, the main holdout was PM Modi not agreeing to the solar energy deal being put forward.

The writer states that Obama had been in conversation with two Indian officials to convince them of the need for India to be a part of the deal and that he had failed to convince them.After the talk with the Indian officials, Obama spent an hour in conversation with PM Modi asking him to make a decision which allows India to a part of the deal.

Throughout the conversation, PM Modi had continuously been underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, with coal being the cheapest option to provide them of it and that while he did care about the environment, he could not ignore the problem of the people mired in poverty.

Obama, on the other hand, addressed the fact that the solar initiative would cause a market shift and that the price of clean fuel would lower, but wasn’t addressing the fact that India would not be given a chance to expand and develop with the usage of coal as its fuel, like America did and that India was being asked to try harder than other countries to develop, which was stopping the deal from occuring.

In the end, Obama told PM Modi that he understood that being asked to work harder without the same means being given to India, when other countries were allowed to so was something he understood, considering that it was something he dealt with all his life, being African-American.

It wasn’t until he said this that PM Modi started considering the deal.Rhodes also states the deal was also done with China, so that India wouldn’t be able to say no to the deal, now that it was alone to do so.