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.

The parallel with Nehru is instructive in another respect. That he has asked to be addressed as “chacha” probably has more than semiotic coincidence. In some respects Kalam’s Vision Twenty Twenty is a smorgasbord of ideas, many of them quite incoherent. But it shared with Nehru the sense of promising a new future, a relentless focus on the long-term big picture, a promise of creating a new India. There was a relentlessness with which Kalam stuck to the big theme, and that relentlessness became a sign of his sincerity. Of course the image that he thought his own thoughts was a huge boost in an age when thoughts are internalised from the outside, due to extraneous pressures. Like Nehru, there was a great faith in science and technology as the source of solution to human problems. Kalam came to office in a nation that reveres engineers more than almost anyone else. The old-fashioned sense that knowledge is the solution to many problems is one that often gets lost in our scepticism about human nature, and particularly that species called politicians.

Indeed, the strength and weakness of Kalam’s outlook is that it is very much an engineer’s: it has little patience for process, incentives, ideology, interests, all the raw material of politics. But it has also helped define the aspirations of a new and emerging India. It is perhaps not a coincidence that in the very same interviews I referred to, Bill Gates comes as a distant second icon. But did this engineering outlook on social problems make Kalam a politician? Not in one significant sense. Part of what people expect from their leaders is hope, a set of answers to their challenges, a set of possibilities, even a plan of action.

It is striking the degree to which every one of Kalam’s speeches always contains a practical idea. The message invariably was: there is always something practical you can do to solve your problems. His addresses to state assemblies round the country always had a list of things to do: build a university here, promote PURA, do this for water, do that for energy. The worth of these ideas is not important. What is important is that, by putting them out, Kalam was able to define the agenda. In three states I personally have had the experience of legislators prefacing their remarks by reference to a “Kalam” solution. Indeed the essence of good politics is to define the agenda, and to replace a sense of negativity with a sense that something can be done. Kalam did that in good measure. Here was a politician, as it were, telling everyone what they could do for themselves. The proposals may appear crazy, but the underlying sensibility was not. We have politicians and policy-makers divided into two camps: those who claim to speak for Shining India and those who claim to speak for India Left Behind. It was Kalam’s remarkable feat to be able to speak for both.

There will be reams written about the Kalam presidency and the creation of brand Kalam. The truth that the idea of brand Kalam captures is the fact that close scrutiny of his qualities is neither here nor there. But it is politicians who most need to learn from his conduct. Kalam was engaging in politics in the deeper sense of the term: he had an unerring instinct for what the people were looking for, he never criticised but only proposed alternatives, he levelled distinctions between people not by lowering the elite but by raising the aspirations of masses, and he relentlessly called attention to the fact that the Office was a means not an end. It is always possible to probe further into his motives and compromises. But he succeeded not because he was apolitical but because he had a sense of what people want in a politician: the capacity to project a future full of possibilities with conviction and sincerity.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research