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Magazine
Our next President
C. RAMMANOHAR REDDY
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam ... token choice?
SINCE there is so much about A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to admire, it is not surprising that his candidature for the Presidency has received enthusiastic public support. It did not matter to his career that he came from a middle class family in a small town on the tip of India. It did not matter that his family had to pledge its assets to send him to college. It did not matter that he did not study abroad. It did not matter that he did not have the right "connections" — by family, community, religion or political patronage. Intelligence, determination and hard work were sufficient to take him up the ladder to the threshold of the highest office in the country. Dr. Kalam's life seems to be an example of what is yet possible in democratic India.
There are of course other reasons why we are excited by the idea of Dr. Kalam in Rashtrapati Bhavan. Since he is what he is because of his achievements in technology, he is unencumbered by the "stain" of politics. In spite of his fame, Dr. Kalam appears on the TV screen and newspapers to so easily and generously reach out to the ordinary citizen. And we like him, above all, because he is a "good" Muslim, or as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) secretary told us, an example of a Muslim who is a "diehard nationalist". As we have been told ad nauseam — he plays the veena, can recite from the Bhagvad Gita and is a vegetarian as well. Our only concern is that he seems to keep his hair in such ungainly locks, unbecoming of residency in the imperial edifice of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Now that we know that his hair is not unkempt, but is maintained by a hairdresser who charges Rs. 500 for each session, we should feel satisfied that there is nothing out of place.
Admirable as Dr. Kalam's career has been, we are typically blind in our adulation. We call him an eminent scientist, forgetting that he was actually first a technology person and then a technology administrator — which is quite different from being a person of science. Those who are more informed and objective also indicate that while his achievements in the Indian Space Research Organisation were remarkable, especially while heading the SLV-3 mission, elsewhere they have been less than outstanding. Even if we were to view missile development as a national mission (which we should not), we cannot ignore the fact that nearly two decades after Dr. Kalam formulated the missile programme, only one missile (the Prithvi) has been inducted into the defence forces. Three others — the Akash, Nag, and Trishul — are still being tested and undergoing trials. And, the Agni, which has been rushed into serial production, draws more on ISRO technology than the efforts of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, which Dr. Kalam subsequently headed.
Of course, there is the small matter of what it says about us that we are in awe of a technologist who has embraced the nuclear option so enthusiastically. It is bad enough that Dr. Kalam was a leading member of the group of scientists/technologists who successfully lobbied long and hard for India to go nuclear. Nearly a month after Dr. Kalam filed his papers, we can only be concerned, not reassured, about his beliefs.
We have come to realise that the next President of India and the current President of Pakistan have one thing in common — they have a dangerous faith in nuclear weapons. Was it a coincidence that both Dr. Kalam and Gen. Musharraf recently both said in press conferences that the possession of nuclear weapons had prevented war between India and Pakistan? Dr. Kalam of course said in May 1998 that the "3,000-year-old" external threat to India had been vacated once and for all by Pokhran-II. He has not changed his views in spite of Kargil, which most people other than the believers in the nuclear option attribute to the two countries going nuclear in 1998. The bomb has worsened and not improved security.
Just as disappointing is the position (or rather silence) of Dr. Kalam on the Gujarat pogrom — the shame of all Indians. At his first press conference after being chosen as a candidate the Presidential election, Dr. Kalam could only say Gujarat was "very painful". No words of condemnation here of the outrage, no words of compassion for the victims, no efforts here to signal that he was not going to be muzzled by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). But Dr. Kalam's silence on Gujarat predates his candidature for President. Commentators have pointed out that in early March he visited Ahmedabad to receive an award for missile technology development. No words even then for the public, only silence, on that visit on March 3, when the killings in Ahmedabad were at their most horrific and it was an occasion for all people of public standing to speak out.
The choice of Dr. Kalam for President is tokenism of a most worrying kind.
E-mail the writer at crr100@india.com
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