Missile scientist Kalem elected as India's president

Asian Political News, July 22, 2002

NEW DELHI, July 18 Kyodo

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a missile scientist who led India's nuclear tests over three years ago, has been elected as India's new president, the country's election commission announced Thursday.

Kalam, 70, won Tuesday's election with 89% of the votes cast by 4,896 national and provincial lawmakers making up a special electoral collage.

He will be sworn in as India's 12th president next Thursday, replacing Kocheril R. Narayanan, whose five-year term expires next Wednesday.

Kalam's only rival in the largely one-sided election was Lakshmi Sehgal, a feminist icon nominated by leftist parties.

Kalam is the first-ever nonpolitician, nonbureaucrat and bachelor president of India, a post considered largely ceremonial in nature.

He becomes India's third Muslim president only months after the Hindu-majority country witnessed one of its worst religious riots in 50 years in the western state of Gujarat. His election also comes at a time when India's relations with its Islamic neighbor and arch foe Pakistan is at an all-time low.

The well-respected dark horse candidate's clean image had endeared him to most major political parties with his apolitical background turning out to be his major asset.

Born into a poor community on Rameshwaram Island in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where his father rented out boats, Kalam sold newspapers as a child to help out his family.

He went on to get a degree in aeronautical engineering, but failed to realize his ambition of making it into the air force.

Instead, he went on to become a noted scientist, first working at the country's space agency before being entrusted to head India's indigenous missile program in the mid 1980s.

Besides his scientific credentials, the long-haired Kalam, renowned for his frugal lifestyle, is also a poet, loves nature, plays the vichitra veena, a rare Indian stringed musical instrument, and is as adept at reciting Hindu holy scriptures as well as the Koran.