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Missile expert set to win Indian presidency

NEW DELHI, Monday (Reuters) Lawmakers in India began voting on Monday for a national president with a Muslim who is father of the country's nuclear missile programme certain to win.

The surprise nomination of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for the mainly ceremonial post by the ruling Hindu nationalist-led coalition was backed by all parties except the communists and his election was seen as a formality.

"I'm feeling fantastic," Kalam, 71, told reporters as lawmakers lined up to vote in parliament.

Kalam, known for his long grey hair and ability to recite from the Koran and the Hindu holy scripture Bhagavadgita with equal ease, was nominated by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee last month after India's worst religious violence in a decade.

Political analysts said the choice of Kalam, plucked from academia after retiring from government, was aimed at silencing critics of the ruling Hindu nationalists, pilloried at home and abroad for the violence in which at least 1,000 people, many of them Muslims, died.

Kalam's expected election for a five-year term to the highest office in the land was seen by analysts as helping the government affirm mainly Hindu India's officially secular standing.

"His credentials are too politically correct, too unblemished for the opposition not to coerce itself into silence," columnist Sankarshan Thakur wrote in the Indian Express of a bachelor who was born to illiterate parents on an island in the southern Bay of Bengal.

Voting began in parliament and state assemblies around the country on Monday and ballots will be counted and results announced on July 18, an election commission official said.

There are 4,896 parliamentary lawmakers and state legislators eligible to cast ballots and voting ends at 1130 GMT.

Kalam was part of a team that conducted India's 1998 nuclear tests and now heads a technology centre at a southern Indian university. If elected, he will be India's eleventh president and the third Muslim to hold that office since India became independent from Britain in 1947. 

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