July 17, 2002	Wednesday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 6, 1423

NEW DELHI: Indian lawmakers voted on Monday to decide whether the country’s next president will be a missile scientist or a lady doctor who was taken prisoner during the Second World War, fighting British colonialists on the side of Japanese troops in Burma.

Voting concluded on Monday at Parliament and all state legislatures, but counting will take place on July 18, after the sealed ballots arrive in New Delhi.

An announcement of the choice of president — whether it is Abdul Kalam or Lakshmi Sehgal — will be made the same day.

But one reason that Kalam, who for years guided India’s missile and nuclear programmes, will win is this: Members of the electoral college consisting of 776 central and 4,120 state legislators are casting their votes along party lines rather than “according to their conscience” as his opponent, the formidable Captain Lakshmi Sehgal, has been appealing to them to do.

A sprightly 88, Sehgal commands all-round respect as one of the surviving leaders of India’s freedom movement against British colonialism, although unlike the Congress party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian National Army (INA) of which she was a member, believed in an armed struggle.

For expedient political reasons, both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the principal opposition Congress party are committed to elect Kalam, whose Muslim background has been pointed to as an advantage for him.

The presidential election follows close on the heels of pogrom unleashed against the minority Muslim community in Gujarat state by Hindu fanatics close to the VHP, a close affiliate of the BJP.

More than a thousand people died and some 150,000 others became homeless and have been living in makeshift camps for nearly five months.

Across the political spectrum, in the aftermath of the communal violence in Gujarat — the worst since independence from the British in 1947 and the traumatic partition into Muslim Pakistan and secular but Hindu-majority India — there has been a sense that this country’s next president, should be a Muslim.

Sehgal, fielded by the communist parties of the Left Front, cannot win against such a phalanx of political parties that back Kalam.

But for her and those who nominated her, the game is not about winning or losing but making a statement in favour of the religious secularism, the ideals on which the country is founded.

But then decades ago, Sehgal and the badly equipped INA, formed of some 50,000 Indian soldiers of the British Army captured by the Japanese during the fall of Singapore in 1941, also had very little chance of taking on the formidable colonial apparatus in India by marching in through Burma — which they nevertheless did.

The INA’s leader Subhas Chandra Bose sought recruits not only from among Indian prisoners of war prepared to switch loyalty from the British to the Japanese, but also from among the Indian diaspora in South-east Asia that wanted to see an end to British colonialism.

Sehgal, who then ran a clinic in Singapore, readily responded to Bose’s call, and became the colonel of a regiment of Indian women. For the rest of her life, she would be known as Captain Lakshmi.

“I am not half as excited about contesting for the presidentship as I was when interviewed by Netaji (leader) Subhas Chandra Bose in 1943 to join the INA,” said Sehgal, who despite her age continues to see patients daily at her clinic for the poor in Kanpur city, 450 km south-east of the national capital.

So what is the present battle all about? “We (the Left Front) are not against Kalam. He is a great scientist but his party, the BJP, is turning him into a political stooge and using him to hide its crimes in Gujarat and change its anti-Muslim image,” argued Sehgal.

The fight is also about maintaining India’s economic freedom under pressure to hasten liberalization. “India is now in danger of being turned into a banana republic. This government is working under American pressure and this is reflected everywhere including the recent opening of the print media to foreign investment,” she added.

Sehgal would also like to see India reopen dialogue with Pakistan to find a solution to the Kashmir problem which nearly triggered war between the neighbours in recent months . “War is not a solution and has never solved any problem in history.”

Soon after her nomination for the presidency, Sehgal commented that choosing as India’s president Abdul Kalam, with his background in strategic weaponry and role in India’s May 1998 nuclear tests, would send the “wrong signals” to Pakistan and the world.

Kalam countered her charge at a press conference, by saying that he has also worked in the country’s space programme and has tried to “transform the country’s technological profile by using science for human resources and augmenting natural resources”.

Kalam’s supporters have said that if Sehgal could take up the gun for her beliefs then, by the same token, Kalam could help with the country’s missile and strategic defence programme.

Sehgal is exasperated by such arguments — and her thoughts are already on returning to her clinic in Kanpur. “At least, I can go back with the satisfaction of having been the first ever woman candidate to have contested for president.”—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.