| With the formal election of Avul Pakir Jainulabedeen Abdul Kalam as the President of India, both India and Pakistan predictably for the next five years are likely to share something in common – each shall have a Muslim as a President, praying in a westward direction to the same target - Mecca. |
| While in Pakistan, anyone who is not a Muslim – even if locally born – cannot aspire to become its president, the presidency of India is still an open goal, accessible to every Indian, regardless of creed. Although India has already had a number of Hindus, at least two Muslims (both of whom died in office) and a Sikh as its president, it has yet to honour a Parsi or a Harijan. The closest the latter caste got to the presidency was Jagjivan Ram, whose ambitions were scotched by the Brahmin Mrs Indira Gandhi. From Dr Rajendra Prasad, its first president, down to Dr K R Narayan, the outgoing President, even with the most questionable of political appointees, the Indian presidency has been acknowledged as a recognition for services to his country, a reward not booty. |
| The career of each has been like a tributary, feeding the Ganges of India’s intellectual, political, social and now technological flow as a nation, and in no case is this more apparent than in the life and contribution of its latest president-elect Dr Abdul Kalam. Out of almost a billion Indians, no other could have been selected in these first years of the new millennium as a more apposite symbol of the ambitions and goals India has set itself for the next thousand years. His opponent Laskhmi Sehgal, revered as she was, belonged though to the Freedom Movement of the 1940s; Dr APJ Abdul Kalam is India’s trajectory into the future.[EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 23 July 2002, titled: A born again missile man, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
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