India's Congress slams President Obama for calling Rahul Gandhi 'nervous leader'

India's main opposition Congress party on Friday came down heavily on former US President Barack Obama for referring to Nehru-Gandhi scion Rahul Gandhi as a "nervous" leader in his newly published political memoir.

"You (President Obama) are wrong to judge the personality of Rahul Gandhiji. You will bite the dust, just wait for sometime," party spokesperson Udit Raj told the media. "We don't need a Barack Obama to pass a judgment on 'Our Leader Rahul Gandhi'," tweeted another Congress leader Archana Dalmia.

In his memoir, 'A Promised Land', President Obama has drawn sketches of several leaders of the US and other nations, which include Rahul Gandhi and former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, according to a US media report.

"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'," The New York Times reporting, quoting a paragraph from the book on the Congress politician.

Gandhi had met President Obama only on a few occasions, the first one being in November 2010 when he was the general secretary of the then ruling Congress party.

The 50-year-old opposition politician's second meeting with Obama was in 2017 when the latter visited India, after leaving the presidency. "Had a fruitful chat with President @BarackObama. Great to meet him again," Gandhi had tweeted after that meeting, tagged with a photograph.

Gandhi, the grandchild of India's first woman Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, announced his entry into politics in 2004, and successfully contested the general elections held that year from Amethi parliamentary constituency in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, a seat that was earlier held by his father Rajiv. He won again from the constituency in 2009 and 2014.

The youth leader led the Congress' campaign in the 2014 Indian general election, but the party suffered its worst electoral result in its history at the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

In 2019, Gandhi contested the general election from two constituencies, Amethi, and Wayanad in the southern Indian state of Kerala. He won the Wayanad seat but lost his existing seat of Amethi to BJP's Smriti Irani, now a Minister, by a margin of over 55,000 votes.