Obama takes auto potshots at Indians

''Because one of the things, obviously, that we have to recognise is that no matter what we do oil prices are going to be going up over the long term,'' he said choosing his first visit to recession-hit Buffalo in upstate New York to plug for public transportation.

“I mean, year to year, they may vary. Sometimes it’s four bucks a gallon at the pump, sometimes it drops back down to two-and-a-half. The mass transit system would be good for the environment too,” he said at a rally in Buffalo on Thursday.

The new grouse about Indians pushing up gas prices comes on top of his much publicised rhetoric in May last year when he announced that US companies that outsource jobs from “Buffalo to Bangalore” would lose their tax incentives.

“You’re not always clear what’s going on, but the long-term trend is just because countries like China and India are starting to buy cars, and so the demand on petroleum and fossil fuels are going to be greater and greater,” said Obama.

“We’ve got to get a first-class transit system,” he told auto-loving Americans, who have 950 cars per thousand people as against 8.5 per thousand for Indians. “We don’t have one right now. We used to be at the top. Now you’ve got China, they’re building multiple high-speed rail lines all across the country, leaving us behind. But it’s not just transit. It’s our ports, our airports, our sewer systems, our water systems,” Obama said.