The standard narrative about A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s immense popularity emphasises the fact that he was an apolitical individual, above the partisanship and pettiness of what we now take to be politics. But there is good reason to think that the opposite is true. What made him appealing to so many was that he offered a different vision of politics; he came to personify what people, in other times and places, expected of their politicians. His greatest success was that, as is the case with great politicians, the idea of Kalam became more important than the individual Kalam. So his individual failings, his occasionally comic persona, his untiring didacticism, his track record of being a survivor in an immensely politicised defence research establishment, the uncertainties over the extent of his scientific contributions, his mushy poetry and even occasional lapses of constitutional judgment became more or less irrelevant to his image. He was the president, who once he took high office put the people beside him.

The extent of Kalam’s popularity was truly staggering. Of late he became a middle-class icon, but the depth of his support would make politicians envious. The Foundation for Academic Access and Excellence, which gives scholarships for higher education to students from marginalised communities, particularly dalits, would routinely ask thousands of applicants to name a role model. Kalam won that contest hands down even amongst the marginalised; it is a sobering thought that no politician is ever named. Which was the last political leader who could so effortlessly transcend class barriers? In some respects we have a pinched-up conception of politics that supposes that origins are everything, that one cannot simultaneously appeal to both the middle class and the masses. A standard piece of idiocy in the literature about Nehru would dismiss him as thoroughly bourgeois. In fact dominant narratives of the decline of secularism always stress that it was an elitist project, with no bearing on the masses. But no post-Independence leader, with the possible exception of Indira Gandhi, could rival Nehru in mass politics. And though Kalam is no Nehru, in a small way, his popularity is testament to the possibility of leaders transcending class barriers.

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