NEW DELHI: India’s newly elected president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, has always been a bit of a dreamer.
“Dream, dream, dream! Conduct these dreams into thoughts and then transform them into action,” the father of India’s nuclear missile programme once said.
But the presidency of the world’s second most populous nation was beyond even Kalam’s wildest dreams.
“It was something so unimaginable,” said the shaggy-haired 71-year-old Muslim scientist, who will be sworn in for his five-year largely ceremonial role on Wednesday.
When Kalam was nominated for the post of president last month, as tensions simmered with Pakistan and following India’s worst religious violence in a decade, critics couldn’t stop carping.
They said it was inappropriate to have somebody dubbed the “Missile Man” as the supreme commander of the armed forces at a time when India was on the brink of war with Pakistan, even if he is a Muslim.
But Kalam was unfazed.
“If we did not have a nuclear weapon, it (war) would have taken place,” the man who led the team that conducted India’s 1998 nuclear tests told reporters last month.
“This nuclear deterrent (on) both sides has helped not to engage in a big war, to avoid a nuclear war,” he said, wagging his fingers in a schoolmaster-like fashion.
But political analysts said the choice of Kalam was a political masterstroke for the Hindu-nationalist party of Prime Minister Atal Bahari Vajpayee which was heavily criticized for failing to control religious violence between Hindus and Muslims in western Gujarat state earlier this year.
Official estimates said around 1,000, mostly Muslims, died in the violence.
MIDDLE CLASS ICON: Kalam will be mainly Hindu India’s third Muslim president.
As president, he has come a long way from being the son of a poor boatman born on a small southern island: his family was so poor his sister is said to have sold her jewellery to pay for his education.
But the new job isn’t the end of his dreams.
In his message to the country Kalam, propelled into the spotlight from academia after retiring from government, said India needed a vision “to get transformed into a developed nation in 20 years’ time” and he would work to achieve it.
“It means a poverty-free nation, a prosperous nation, and a healthy nation with value systems (in which) our children will live happily.”
Although largely ceremonial, the presidency carries some significant powers: appointing the prime minister in case of a hung parliament, which is increasingly possible in an age of coalition politics.
Kalam said his lack of political experience was not a handicap as he had dealt with political leaders in the last two decades when he worked on India’s rocket and missile programmes.
Kalam certainly isn’t your stereotypical Indian leader: he looks like a rock star, writes poetry and can recite from the Holy Quran and the Hindu scripture, Bhagavadgita, with equal ease.
And he can talk about liquid fuel propellants and his veena — a stringed musical instrument — in the same breath.
His relatives described him as a shy boy who read every book he could lay his hands on.
Kalam, who headed a technology centre at a university before his presidential nomination, has become a middle-class icon and sales of his autobiography, “Wings of Fire”, shot up recently.
As a rocket scientist with the Indian Space Research Organization, he is credited for the success of India’s first satellite launch vehicle in 1980, the fifth country in the world to achieve such capability.
Through the 1980s, he worked with the Defence Research and Development Organization heading integrated missile development. Much of his fame are nuclear-capable Agni and Prithvi missiles with a maximum range of 3,500 kms.
After he resigned from government, Kalam embarked on a new mission: to meet and “ignite” at least 100,000 students by spreading a message of peace and development.
After it was certain he was only a few weeks away from the red sandstone presidential palace, Kalam quoted from the Bhagavadgita to reflect his feelings.
“Whatever happened has happened for the good,” said the bachelor scientist known for his spartan lifestyle and eccentric manner.
“Whatever is happening is happening for the good and whatever will happen will happen for the good.”—Reuters
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