A Tribute to Former President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Former President Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, popularly known as Missile man, passed away after collapsing while delivering a lecture at the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong yesterday. His sudden demise has left a great vacuum in the country which can never be filled up. He was highly respected for his outstanding personality and humanitarian qualities. He graced the Indian Presidency for five years from 2002-2007. He became the 11th President of the country in July 2002 during the NDA Government; the head of state was seen to be the titular head who drew attention to himself and his office only when somber constitutional questions were thrown up in the aftermath of an uncertain electoral verdict particularly the hung Lok Sabha. For the rest, the President of India was to be wrapped and enclosed in dignified and ceremonial hauteur, acting on the aid and advice of an elected Government collectively responsible to the Lok Sabha. The people generally treated the President just a rubber stamp having no substantial powers. But President Kalam proved all these assumptions wrong and gave a new colour to the highest constitutional office of the country which the people can never forget.Dr. Abdul Kalam occupied the office of the President of India in the year 2002 during the N D A Government soon after the unfortunate Gujarat riots that had exposed deep communal fault lines in the nation and when even his predecessor President K. R. Narayanan had taken up the matter with the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He was deeply perturbed to see the gross human rights violations in the state of Gujarat after the Godhra incident. The Atal Behari Vajpayee government selected him as its presidential candidate, the Congress lent him its support and he was elected with just a little less than 90 per cent of the valid votes. This is how he was elected as President.Soon after assuming the highest constitutional office, President Dr. Kalam visited riot-ravaged Gujarat over the objections of the government of the day and met the affected people. And almost from Day One he began to open up the presidency to the people. Soon he became the peoples’ President. He used to share peoples’ pain. He was the Thiruvalluvar-quoting scientist who became head of state, opening wider the possibility of the non-politician, and the outsider to the political system, presiding over it. Long before discontent with the political class would spill on to the streets of the nation’s capital in the form of the Anna movement and become the propulsive force for the meteoric rise of the Aam Aadmi Party, it was Dr. Kalam, perhaps, who answered the need, in cynical times, for the role model who had no axe to grind. He could quote from the Bhagwat Gita as from the Holy Koran. He had a rich knowledge of comparative religion. He was a true secular man who spoke directly, with child-like enthusiasm, to the young, many years before it had become fashionable to invoke and refer to India’s “demographic dividend”. He embodied a positive solution-centric approach that made people believe that despite the hurdles, the prejudices and the political turbulence, greatness was at hand — it just needed ignited minds and a Vision 20:20. He was a true supporter of advanced India. It was his vision to see India as a developed country.President Kalam acted successfully as a constitutional head of the Union Government for five years. Though he was not trained in Westminster Parliamentary jurisprudence, he acted as a citizen President. The limited powers which the office of the President of India has were truly utilized by him in national interest. After the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1976, the President has limited role in the decision-making process of the Union Government. Generally the President is bound to act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers headed by the Prime Minister in the exercise of his constitutional powers and functions except in a few areas where he can act on his own discretion. Even before 1976, this position was well-settled. But the President is not a rubber stamp or a cipher. No Government can take the President as granted.The idea of a rubber stamp President was completely alien to him. He believed in action and took the office of the President as an opportunity to serve the masses. In 2005, in Moscow, in the dead of night, President Kalam unquestioningly approved the Union Cabinet’s decision to impose President’s rule in Bihar. But he was not happy with that development. That was a low point in his presidency, which his then secretary would later record in his memoirs, almost led him to resign. The hasty decision of Manmohan Singh Government caused him pain particularly when it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Rameshwar Prasad v. State of Bihar case in 2006. President Kalam was personally against the misuse of Article 356 of the Constitution in Bihar case and had expreesed his desire to resign from...

A Tribute to Former President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Dr. Lokendra Malik

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