NEW DELHI, 16 July — Voting by lawmakers for a new president ended yesterday 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 extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-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, including in insurgency-wracked Kashmir, where troops sealed off the assembly building to ensure rebels did not target lawmakers.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani were among the first to cast their votes in the seven hours of polling. The president of the main opposition Congress party Sonia Gandhi also cast her ballot. The votes will be counted on 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, was nominated by Vajpayee last month after India’s worst religious violence in a decade.
Analysts said the choice of Kalam, plucked from academia after retiring from government, was aimed at silencing critics of the ruling Hindu extremists, pilloried at home and abroad for the violence in which over 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 BJP has come under fierce criticism over the religious violence in western Gujarat state.
A wave of revenge killings swept Gujarat. Human rights groups put the death toll at 2,500 in the state, one of the few 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 leader of a team that conducted 1998 nuclear tests and now heads a technology center at a southern Indian university. If elected, he will be India’s 11th 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 Pakistan are locked in a military standoff over Kashmir. Close to a million troops have been massed along their border since a December attack on the Parliament that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants. 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 Capt. Lakshmi Sahgal, an 87-year-old woman activist of the Indian National Army, which fought for the country’s independence. “It is nice that there is a contest,” Kalam told reporters at Parliament. The Communists opposed Kalam in part because they accused him of not speaking out loudly enough against the riots in Gujarat, in which mostly Muslims were killed. 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.
