INDIA: As a Muslim, the new first citizen is considered a 'politically correct' choice for the ruling BJP, writes Rahul Bedi, in New Delhi
India's "missile man", Mr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who began life as a newspaper-seller, was elected the country's 12th president yesterday.
The defence scientist responsible for developing a variety of short, medium and long-range conventional and nuclear-capable missiles overwhelmingly defeated the Communist-backed candidate, former captain Mr Laxmi Sehgal, who fought the Allies in the Burmese jungles during the second World War as part of a Japanese-backed rebel Indian army.
Mr Kalam won over 90 per cent of the votes polled by the electoral college of MPs and state legislators.
The 71-year-old Muslim bachelor from a tiny fishing village in southern India with shoulder-length, rock-star grey locks and alarmingly casual dress sense, said a change in jobs was nothing new for him.
"Every time I change (jobs), I enrich myself and my colleagues," Mr Kalam said.
After taking over as first citizen from President K.R. Narayanan, who completes his five-year term next week, Mr Kalam said he would work to build a prosperous and healthy India with a solid value system for future generations.
He will also be trading his two-roomed university flat in the southern port city of Madras, where he is a professor emeritus, for the 345-room presidential palace designed by the British architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, that annually costs over 90 million rupees (€1.8 million) to maintain.
Although the Communist parties opposed Mr Kalam's candidature and fielded Mr Sehgal, his elevation to India's largely ceremonial top post was a foregone conclusion, backed as he was by Prime Minister Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition and major opposition parties.
Over the past decade, however, the presidency has played an important role in forming coalition governments.
Being a Muslim Mr Kalam was deemed a "politically correct" choice for the BJP in what opposition MPs and analysts claim is a clever move aimed at silencing international criticism over Mr Vajpayee's inept handling of the three-month long pogrom against Muslims in western Gujarat state in which over 1,000 people have been killed.
Opposition parties, the media and human rights activists accused Gujarat's BJP government and the local police of aiding Hindu mobs in " ethnically cleansing" Muslims after a suspected Muslim mob torched a trainload of 59 Hindus in February. Mr Kalam dubbed the Gujarat killings a " tragedy".
The BJP conveniently glossed over Mr Kalam's recent criticisms of the government in which he accused a pusillanimous India, a nation of over a billion people, of "behaving like a nation of a million". He also withheld the release of his forthcoming book, believed to censure the BJP-led government after his presidential candidature was announced last month.
"I do not buy that he will be the voice of Muslims. No Muslim leader has done anything for Indian Muslims", Mr Naseem Qureshi, a retired teacher at Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia University, said. Others declared that President Narayanan, whom Kalam succeeds, was India's first president from the Dalit or untouchable caste, but he did little or nothing for his community that comprises more than 40 per cent of one billion-plus Indians.
Mr Kalam's illiterate father, Jainulabdeen Maricar, who rented out boats to fishermen, ensured that his son was well educated.
After studying aeronautical engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology in the south, Mr Kalam joined the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thumba, in adjoining Kerala state, as one of its first three engineers in 1962 where he was instrumental in launching the country's first satellite into orbit.
The satellite technology evolved into a missile development programme, which Mr Kalam headed from 1983 till leaving the government in 2001.
His bachelor status, along with his long hair, is also posing a protocol problem, as his job entails hosting an endless stream of guests and lavish banquets.
"This is the first time that both president and prime minister are bachelors," a presidential secretariat official said.
"We will somehow manage, but for a start it means that India will have to forgo attending the First Ladies of Asia and Pacific meeting which is next scheduled for Pakistan."