It has been a little more than four years since former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam passed away. But his cult only seems to grow bigger in India. There is no former president, not even a celebrated scientist, who is as popularly remembered as A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.
What explains the cult of Kalam? What explains reactions like this one:
61 days to Abdul Kalam Sir’s vision 2020. Feels like yesterday we studied that in school. Fuck. Time is flying people.
— Siddharth (@ssaig) 31 October 2019
If his religious identity was the only reason Kalam was liked, you wouldn’t see people recalling his 1998 book, India 2020. The banal book co-written with Y.S. Rajan had the usual ideas for economic development you find in endless sarkari documents. How bright were Kalam’s ideas is not the point here. We are asking why so many young people continue to be enamoured of Kalam and his words.
Also read: How this simple, God-loving Indian Muslim left behind such an enduring legacy
That is the mantra
Gayatri Mohan, a class 10 girl who aspires to be a scientist, takes the mic and asks, “Sir, I would like to hear from you a few tips for the upcoming generation to succeed in life.”
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam replies: “To succeed in life you have to do four things. Repeat with me… I will have great aim. I will continuously acquire knowledge. Number three, I will do hard work. I will persevere. I will succeed.”
“Thank you sir,” the student replies.
“Ok, that is the mantra,” Kalam says.
This is the beginning of a 15-minute video of a 2012 event where Kalam answered questions by students. It is the most-watched video related to A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on YouTube, with 14 million views.
The cult of Kalam is not about his achievements as a scientist (there are many scientists out there). It’s not about his being a former president (who remembers Pratibha Patil?). It’s not about his religious identity (Hindutva today doesn’t even need ‘good’ Muslims). The cult of Kalam is about how he became a motivational speaker for a generation of young Indians. His presidency only added to his career as a motivational author and speaker. Today, there are motivational speakers who use Kalam’s words to run their business!
As a motivational speaker, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam gave young students the most addictive psychotropic substance: hope.
Karl Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opium of the masses. Hope is the opium of the masses. As the Hindustani saying goes, the world lives on hope.
To sell a dream in 1998 that India can become a developed country by 2020, is to sell the drug of hope. To tell teenagers that they will live in a wealthy, prosperous country in the prime of their adult life is to give them a reason to strive for success. His life journey from a town in Tamil Nadu to Rashtrapati Bhavan via the nuclear programme is part of the cult, it certainly gave him the credibility a seller of hope needs.
Kalam must have loved the high it gave him to play the part of a hero. When he died of a cardiac arrest at 83 years of age, he was delivering a speech in IIM Shillong.
The cult of Kalam is not to be taken lightly. A 70-minute long audio of Gulzar reading Kalam’s autobiography in Hindi has over 5 million views. By the millions, people are watching videos with titles like, “Last eight hours of Kalam’s life”, “APJ Abdul Kalam’s top 10 rules for success”, “Bangla motivational video on APJ Abdul Kalam,” and so on.
And you have to see the comments on these videos to believe them. “I miss you sir,” writes Prashant Anand. “I am unlucky that I can’t meet him,” writes Ameya Bhagwat. “The gem of modern India,” writes Sachin Dubey. “A person with zero haters,” writes Monster Z. “It’s being 4yrs ago he left 🙁 he is the real leader no one can equal to him even for 1000 yrs,” writes Devraj YNWA. “I request youtube to remove the dislike button on this video,” writes Karthikeyan Mitran. “I don’t know why tears roll down when I hear your voice, Sir…,” writes Prathyush. On that Gulzar video, the popular demand is to make Kalam’s autobiography part of the school syllabi. You will find such comments pouring in all over the internet even today, many from people who say they were inspired by Kalam in their youth.
Also read: The good Muslim-bad Muslim binary is as old as Nehru
Many flavours of the same drug
As the cult of Kalam keeps growing since his death, he is seen as a modern-day saint. Like babas and gurus, like Osho or Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Babas and gurus, incidentally, sell the same drug: hope (with spiritual tadka). Spiritual leaders create vast empires out of selling hope.
There’s another person who made a cult figure out of himself by selling hope: Narendra Modi. This is the political flavour of the same drug. Just as Kalam used to package his drug as ‘India 2020’, Modi does it as ‘India 2022’ and now that 2022 is close, it’s been re-packaged as ‘$5-trillion economy by 2024’. Every alternate Sunday, Modi sells a heated dose of hope-drug on his radio programme, Mann Ki Baat. We Indians love waiting for Godot.
The more destitute you are, the more you need hope. It is by selling hope that Modi wins votes even though he’s actually destroying hope by driving the economy into a structural slowdown. Those who think the BJP’s growing hegemony over Indian politics shall be countered by propping up an unnatural alliance in Maharashtra, should read the comments on A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s YouTube videos. Defeating Modi needs the selling of a new and improved version of the hope-drug.
Also read: 40 things Modi has promised to achieve by 2022
Kalam and secular politics
A retired scientist hailed for his role in the 1998 nuclear tests, Kalam was the president from 2002 to 2007. The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government didn’t have the numbers in Parliament to make anyone they liked the president of India. Kalam was not the first choice of either the BJP, or the RSS, or the Congress. His name for Rashtrapati Bhavan was proposed by Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party to break the deadlock over the presidential elections.
Many Left-liberals and Muslims have long seen APJ Abdul Kalam as a kind of secular betrayal. He came across as ‘culturally’ more Hindu than Muslim — just how the RSS wants Indian Muslims to be. In a majoritarian India, it is felt, Muslims have to deny their Muslim-ness and, as if that’s not enough, appear to be ‘culturally Hindu’ and recognise that their forefathers had converted from the Hindu faith, out of either choice or, perhaps, duress.
For Left-liberals, Kalam seemed to legitimise the Hindutva government of Vajpayee, particularly as he became president soon after the Gujarat pogrom in 2002. (Kalam had something to say about that later.)
There may be some truth to this argument, but that does not fully explain the mass cult of Kalam among youth from north to south India. Kalam’s political critics are unfair to him. Had he been made president by a Congress government, they would have hailed him as a symbol of Indian syncretism and secularism. In fact, the ever-rising cult of Kalam shows us how a mix of hope and inclusive nationalism can wade through Hindu-Muslim polarisation.
Only the 23rd most-watched video about Kalam on YouTube is about his religious identity. The 8-year old animated educational video, targeted at children, has 2.4 million views.
It’s based on his poem, A lesson for my teacher, about a childhood memory of religious discrimination. A school teacher asks a Muslim cap-wearing Kalam not to sit in class next to his best friend, son of the head priest of the Shiva temple. The head priest gets to know this and tells the school-teacher to let Kalam sit next to his son, and even makes the teacher apologise to Kalam.