SOUTH ASIA: India’s Latest Missile is the Missile Man

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 16 2002 (IPS) - India’s latest missile in its image battle with its Islamic neighbour, Pakistan, is the ‘Missile Man’ himself — A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the Muslim chief architect of India’s missile and nuclear programmes.

Kalam is the main candidate for the presidency in elections due on Jul. 15. His nomination by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led ruling National Democratic Alliance was certain to succeed after it received support from the powerful Congress party, which leads the national Opposition, and important regional parties such as the Samajwadi (socialist) Party, in western Uttar Pradesh state.

In fact, Kalam’s candidacy was forcefully backed by Chandrababu Naidu, progressive chief minister of southern Andhra Pradesh state, whose regional Telugu Desam Party (TDP) controls a critical five percent of votes in the electoral college consisting of both Parliament and the state legislatures that elect the President.

The only major political grouping opposed to Kalam’s candidacy is the Left Front, which prefers someone with a background in politics and which strongly opposes the BJP’s policy of nuclearisation implemented by Kalam, as the country’s top defence scientist and scientific advisor to the prime minister.

Sitaram Yechuri, a member of the politburo of the Communist Party of India- Marxist (CPI-M), claims that the BJP wants to “pursue its aggressive nationalism by making the father of the Indian missile programme also the supreme commander of the armed forces”.

Of his string of achievements, Kalam, a home-grown scientist who once sold newspapers for a living at a railway station in his native southern Tamil Nadu state, is credited most for building India’s largely indigenous missile and space programmes, earning him the sobriquet of the “missile man”.

The Left Front has decided to symbolically field Lakshmi Sehgal, the 87-year-old leader of the Indian National Army (INA) which fought the British during the independence movement, who despite her age remains a practicing doctor.

But Sehgal was chosen only after the Leftists failed to get eminent Muslims like A.M. Ahmadi, former chief justice of the Supreme Court and P.M. Sayeed, deputy speaker of the Lok Sabha (law-making Lower House of Parliament) to enter into a clearly uneven contest with Kalam.

Although India’s presidency is largely ceremonial and its powers comparable to that enjoyed by a constitutional monarch, it carries enormous moral authority and can influence and guide policy especially on occasions when it becomes necessary to place an erring or afflicted province under direct federal rule.

Kalam will not be the first Muslim to occupy the palatial, cream and pink sandstone Rashtrapati Bhavan or presidential palace which was once the home of British viceroys who ruled the entire sub-continent until independence and the traumatic partition of their erstwhile colony into Islamic Pakistan and secular but Hindu-majority India in 1947.

India under the Congress party, which led the country to independence and ruled for the most of the years afterwards, cannot be faulted for not maintaining the secular ideals of leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawharalal Nehru as far as the presidency goes.

Out of a line of ten presidents the country has had so far, two were Muslims including the scholarly Zakir Hussein (elected in 1967) and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad (elected in 1974).

This time, though, the search for a suitable Muslim candidate turned particularly keen because the presidential election comes in the wake of a pogrom unleashed on the Muslim community in western Gujarat state ruled by the avowedly pro-Hindu, BJP three months ago.

What triggered off the pogrom was the Feb 27 torching at the Godhra station in Gujarat of a train carrying Hindus campaigning to get a temple built at Ayodhya on the site where a 16th century mosque built by Muslim invaders was demolished ten years ago by Hindu fundamentalists.

The presidential elections also follow a dangerous, nuclear-edged military confrontation with Pakistan triggered off by a jihadist attempt to blow up Parliament with a bomb-laden car in December which left 14 people, half of them policemen, dead.

India accused Pakistan of being behind the terrorist attack and said it was part of sustained violent attempts, that have included two full-fledged wars in 1949 and 1965, to prise Kashmir, its only Muslim-majority province out of the Indian Union in the name of religion.

High level international diplomacy over the past fortnight led by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resulted in Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf pledging to put an end to cross-border terrorism over the Line of Control (LoC) in disputed Kashmir and the beginnings of military de-escalation by India.

Both India and Pakistan consider the complete possession of Kashmir, already divided between the two by the 700-kilometre LoC or ceasefire line to be important for their respective nationhoods because of the ‘two-nation theory’ essentially based on religion under which they were torn asunder by the 1947 partition that accompanied independence.

The partition was a disaster and at least two million of the 15 million people who poured over the newly drawn borders in the provinces of western Punjab and eastern Bengal were slaughtered as Hindus and Muslims fell upon each other, leaving a lasting legacy of hatred that would erupt into armed conflict between the two countries every now and then.

In India, which chose the secular path and continued to have 130 million Muslims within its borders, violence and rioting have erupted frequently between Hindus and Muslims especially as issues of religion became increasingly intertwined with democratic politics and the Congress party began to be accused of “appeasing the minorities” by Hindu fundamentalist groups.

Riding on the back of a tide of Hindu sentiment directed against what India’s power home minister L.K. Advani frequently refers to as the Congress party’s “pseudo-secularism” the BJP finally seized national power in 1998 but still needs the support of regional parties politically opposed to the Congress party but equally fearful of the BJP’s fundamentalism.

After the Gujarat incidents it is now the BJP’s turn to indulge in a bit of pseudo secularism and appeasement of the minorities.

While Kalam was not the first choice of the BJP, the party more than readily bowed to the wishes of its biggest ally, the TDP of Andhra Pradesh chief minister Naidu, who had openly condemned the pogrom in Gujarat.

The adverse image that the BJP received in the Indian media over Gujarat was relieved only by the spiraling military confrontation with Pakistan and Leftist leaders opposed to Kalam’s election have accused the BJP of trying to “whitewash” what happened in Gujarat by elevating a Muslim to the presidency.

Kalam’s candidacy was also strongly backed by the Samajwadi Party (SP), the most powerful political entity in northern Uttar Pradesh and whose chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav is hugely popular with the Muslim community in the state.

Undoubtedly, Kalam as president has huge symbolic value for an India anxious to preserve the secular democratic ideals of its founding fathers now under siege not only by Hindu fundamentalists but also by a Pakistan laying claim to Kashmir on the grounds that it has a Muslim-majority population.