Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s E-ministration
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Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, India’s 11th president and a man well-known in the Asian subcontinent for his scientific mind, has started to apply new technology to the democratic process. For several months, Kalam has featured a “Children’s Corner” on his official website where he painstakingly responds to hundreds of questions sent in via email every day. The answers, which he guarantees within 48 hours, are not all necessarily revelations and rarely do they offer even wholly unique insight, but the international community is starting to take notice of the President’s humble efforts.
Just last week, Kalam created new waves when he posted an open question on Yahoo’s “Answers Forum”. The subject, “What should we do to free our planet from terrorists?,” has culled in thousands of replies thus far, with the respondents ranging from other Indian government officials to teenagers in Denmark to American retirees. A great majority of the answers prove to be little more than idealisms. One man’s list of 5 suggestions to end terrorism includes only:
1- Be fair in all your dealings.
2- Be honest with the people.
3- Open dialogue with your friends and others.
4- Give them reasons to trust you.
5- Show respect to those underprivileged
Another man posits that if we just take on a “live and let live” attitude towards extremists, our problems will subside. Several other answers take a more practical stance, but do not necessarily include specific recommendations for how to contend with the ramifications and complexities of the negotiation process. “Pramod”, an engineer from India suggests that terrorism emerges from factors that include “less education”, “economic unbalance”, “excessive population” and “delayed justice” among others. He therefore advises that we would be best served to “solve these issues” to make terrorist acts disappear. Few people would argue that the world wouldn’t be a better place if there were no disparity or if “life weren’t unfair”. The process of ending disparity, however, is not as simple as some of the respondents would have us believe. The process of ending disparity that plays out in the real world as the liberation of an Afghanistan where women could formerly be stoned for not wearing a burkha in public just as in Iraq where a tyrant inflicted genocide on the Kurdish people is indeed often the cause of terrorism itself.
But regardless of how pragmatic Kalam’s system may be towards actually solving terrorism, the method has functioned flawlessly to generate a public discourse. Within the first five days since being posted, the question has received 12383 answers, more than almost any other question on the site by numerous magnitudes. People are intrigued by the idea of having a virtual audience with the leader of a major nation, and Kalam’s use of the internet cleverly plays into that aspect of human nature. Even beyond the political savvy Kalam demonstrates in his active cultivation of dialogue, he is also perceptibly changing several Indians’ views on Islam.
In a modern world where Islam is more often noted for its extremist aspects, Kalam serves as the exemplary figure of a moderate Muslim. In his private life, Kalam claims to be very devout, abstaining from meat, alcohol and even going so far as to practice total celibacy in accordance with his Tirukkural beliefs. Regarding the public sphere, though, Kalam is progressive and engaging. His goal is to help India attain a technological infrastructure that can match the intellectual capacities the country already possesses. Also notable, Kalam advocates the strengthening of India’s nuclear program to defend it from any potential attack, a complex decision considering that an Islamic state would almost certainly be the one who launched such an attack.
It will be interesting to see in the coming years whether Kalam’s “projects” to make the democratic process more approachable to common citizens will work effectively. If anything is apparent from his early attempts, it is that people not closely involved in politics are prone to address specific problems with broad and fuzzy answers. Still, what better way to gauge the state of a nation than to have the nation, itself, tell you? As impractical and as blindly expectant as a janitor’s answer to the terrorism problem may be, and as formulaic as Kalam’s personalized input regularly is, perhaps tapping the internet for its full user-feedback potential isn’t a bad move. It may indeed be gimmicky, but well-trusted gimmicks have often functioned effectively in limited times.
