Posted on 07/15/2002 7:50:30 AM PDT by GeneD
Filed at 10:19 a.m. ET
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Voting by lawmakers for India's new national president ended Monday with a Muslim who is the father of the country's nuclear missile program certain to win.
The surprise nomination of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for the mainly ceremonial post by the ruling Hindu nationalist-led coalition was backed by all parties except the communists and his election was seen as a formality.
An election commission official said the ballot boxes had been sealed at the end of the day-long vote in parliament and state legislatures around the country. The votes will be counted Thursday and the result announced that day.
``I'm feeling fantastic,'' Kalam, 71, told reporters as lawmakers lined up to vote in parliament.
Kalam, known for his long gray hair and ability to recite from the Koran and the Hindu holy scripture Bhagavadgita with equal ease, was nominated by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee last month after India's worst religious violence in a decade.
Political analysts said the choice of Kalam, plucked from academia after retiring from government, was aimed at silencing critics of the ruling Hindu nationalists, pilloried at home and abroad for the violence in which at least 1,000 people, many of them Muslims, died.
Kalam's expected election for a five-year term to the highest office in the land was seen by analysts as helping the government affirm mainly Hindu India's officially secular standing.
``His credentials are too politically correct, too unblemished for the opposition not to coerce itself into silence,'' columnist Sankarshan Thakur wrote in the Indian Express of a bachelor who was born to illiterate parents on an island in the southern Bay of Bengal.
Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party has come under fierce criticism over the religious violence in western Gujarat state.
A wave of revenge killings swept Gujarat in February and March after a train carrying Hindu activists was torched, killing 59 people. Police blamed the attack on a Muslim mob.
Human rights groups put the death toll at 2,500 from the carnage that followed the train attack in Gujarat, one of the few major states controlled by the BJP, which has been blamed for not doing enough to stop the bloodshed.
There were 4,896 parliamentary lawmakers and state legislators eligible to cast ballots in the presidential election.
Kalam was part of a team that conducted India's 1998 nuclear tests and now heads a technology center at a southern Indian university. If elected, he will be India's eleventh president and the third Muslim to hold that office since India became independent from Britain in 1947.
But his election would come at a time when India and its Islamic neighbor, Pakistan, are locked in a military standoff over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
Close to a million troops have been massed along their border since a December attack on India's parliament that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Muslim militants.
A fresh attack on Hindus in Indian Kashmir by suspected Islamic militants in which 28 people died at the weekend has stoked tensions with Islamabad. Pakistan condemned the raid.
New Delhi says it will not pull back its troops from the border until Islamabad halts the flow of militants into the Muslim-majority Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Election to the presidency would make Kalam supreme commander of the armed forces under the constitution but analysts say effective military control resides with the government.
The communists, which have few members in the electoral college made up of parliamentary lawmakers and state assemblies, have fielded Lakshmi Sahgal, an 87-year-old woman activist of the Indian National Army, which fought for India's independence.
The new president will take over from K.R. Narayanan, India's first lower-caste person to occupy the office, who finishes his term this month.
Essentially the position Kalam seems prone to win (the presidency of India) is a purely ceremonial post ....thus implying he will not be running the country in any form.
You could say he is a mere figurehead ....who knows, maybe if they decide to nuke Pakistan they can say 'we did it with a Muslim prez on board, and thus possibly placate vitriolic arabs.'
After all technically India would become 'headed by a Muslim' even though in reality the real power rests with the Prime Minister, who is NOT a muslim!
Might be an interesting stratagem.
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