Tag Archives: obituary

India

Abdul Kalam, India’s popular former president, has died

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Photo credit to The Hindustan Times.

Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, who served as his country’s (chiefly ceremonial) president from 2002 to 2007, died today at age 83 after collapsing while delivering a lecture to students at the Indian Institute of Management in Shillong.India Flag Icon

Abdul Kalam was often nicknamed ‘the people’s president,’ and with good reason — he is being remembered fondly today across the political spectrum:

As a leading engineer, he was the face of India’s nuclear weapons program — making him a living embodiment of an accomplishment that immediately bolstered India’s standing in the scientific community and on foreign policy. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honor, in 1997 and, with the success of India’s nuclear weapons tests in 1998, he became India’s ‘missile man’ before he became its ‘people’s president.’

Abdul Kalam was also an independent voice as India’s president. A Tamil Muslim, he was elected as president in 2002 in the wake of the anti-Muslim riots that so tarred the record of Gujarat’s first minister and now, prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Abdul Kalam belonged to no party — he’s the last truly independent to have been elected to the presidency. Moreover, he stood up to prime minister Manmohan Singh by initially rejecting a 2006 bill that would loosen rules on holding ‘offices of profit’ — the new law followed Sonia Gandhi’s resignation from several positions deemed to be offices of profit. Gandhi has served as the president of the Indian National Congress (Congress, भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस) since 1998, including its decade-long stint in power between 2003 and 2013.

He used the office of the presidency to great effect at home and abroad — and though he’s been described as apolitical, Pratap Bhanu Mehta argued in The Indian Express in 2007 that he conducted his presidency as the consummate politician:

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.

Alberta, Canada

Longtime conservative Albertan premier Ralph Klein has died

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No one symbolized the conservatism of western Canada more than Ralph Klein, who died today at age 70.

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Elected Alberta’s premier in 1992, Klein served until 2006, championing the ‘Alberta Advantage,’ and presiding over what became Canada’s wealthiest province, the heartland of today’s Conservative Party.

Tory leader Stephen Harper has represented a Calgary riding in the House of Commons since 1993, and the Reform Party, later the Canadian Alliance, got its start among Calgarian conservatives like Harper and Preston Manning.  Harper engineered a merger with the then-decimated Progressive Conservative Party at the national level, resulting in the united center-right government he leads today.

Klein, who remained firmly planted in Albertan provincial politics, nonetheless became the ideological godfather of the more fiscally conservative, more Western, and more aggressive conservatism that came to Canadian federal politics in the early 2000s under Harper.

Despite his resignation (with a push from his Progressive Conservative colleagues) as premier in 2006, Klein’s legacy may also be one of the reasons that Albertan premier Alison Redford, despite slumping polls, held on to win a full term as premier in the April 2012 Albertan provincial election in the face of a more stridently populist and socially conservative challenge from the newer Wildrose Party.  The win continued a Progressive Conservative run of power that’s been uninterrupted since 1971.

As Don Braid of The Calgary Herald writes, much of Klein’s legacy is in his campaign to eliminate Alberta’s debt:

It’s deeply ironic that at the moment of his death, Ralph Klein’s legacy has been formally overturned, as a new wave of Alberta politicians revert to debt, borrowing and deficit as the chief tools of government. Klein banned those things. He paid off debt and then made it illegal. A man who knew how to squeeze a penny, he was the perfect leader to throw off the crushing debt Alberta faced when he took office in late 1992.

Read it all, but there’s much more from The Calgary Herald here, including this video and this timeline of his life.

Colby Cosh at MacLean’s notes his legacy on debt, but also on federalism and the assertion of Alberta’s growing regional power, despite Klein’s prickly attitude toward eastern Canada — he once termed eastern migrants to his province ‘creeps and bums’:

The ways in which Ralph Klein is misunderstood outside Alberta seem to mirror the ways in which Alberta itself is misunderstood; although attachment to religion is actually lower in Alberta than in Ontario and the Atlantic Provinces, it is Alberta that is thought of as an atavistic, “socially conservative” hate factory. The real difference between Alberta and other provinces is more structural than ideological or religious. Alberta has a strong lingering streak of laissez-faire utilitarianism because most of its citizens are no more than a generation removed from those who came here for jobs.

The Globe and Mail gathers some of Klein’s more memorable quotes here, including this quintessential quote from when he was Calgary’s mayor from 1980 to 1989:

“Everyone knows I have sins. I eat too much. I still drink. I gamble and, God forbid, I still see some of my old friends.” – In April, 1982, explaining how he hadn’t let being mayor completely alter his lifestyle.

The Toronto Star‘s Petti Fong considers Klein’s relationship with the Chinese community here, and Don Martin’s take at The National Post here.

Photo credit to John Ulan of the Canadian Press.

Ghana

Death of Ghana’s president John Atta Mills leaves December election unsettled

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John Atta Mills, the president of Ghana, died yesterday somewhat unexpectedly, leaving Ghana’s future less clear in advance of December’s presidential election.

His vice president, John Dramani Mahama, has been sworn in as his replacement, and according to the Daily Graphic, will likely be the presidential candidate of Mills’s National Democratic Congress in December.

A longtime crusader for constitutional reform in the West African country of nearly 25 million people, and a symbol of a peaceful, democratic tradition still relatively rare throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Mills was elected in December 2008 in a very close election against Nana Akufo-Addo.

Mills, a quiet-mannered law professor, previously served from 1997 to 2001 as vice president to Jerry Rawlings.  Rawlings initially took power in a 1979 coup, but subsequently retired from the military and managed Ghana’s largely successful transition to democracy following a 1992 constitutional referendum.  He was elected president in his own right in 1992 and 1996.  That transition, two decades years ago, has held up relatively well — Rawlings transferred power peacefully to his political rival, John Kufuor, in 2001, who transferred power peacefully in 2009 to Mills.

The strength of Ghana’s institutions was on display yesterday, with no significant hitches in Mahama’s swearing-in:

Analysts took that smooth transition as reassurance of the robustness of Ghana’s institutions. “The constitutional process kicked into gear pretty well,” said Antony Goldman of the Africa-focused group PM Consulting. Razia Khan, head of Africa research at Standard Chartered bank, said: “The smooth inauguration of Mahama as President is an encouraging sign of strength of Ghana’s democratic institutions.”

Mills oversaw the first-ever oil production in Ghana in 2010 on the appropriately-named Jubilee oilfield, which has sparked maginificent double-digit growth rates — Ghana’s economy previously rested on gold mining, cocoa and other exports.  While its GDP per capita (even with newly discovered oil reserves) remains small in comparison to South Africa or Botswana  — or even Angola — Ghana has outpaced per capita GDP per capita of other West African countries like Sengal by 150% and countries like Mali and Burkina Faso by 200% to 300%.

In contrast to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana has not been torn apart by ethnic or sectarian or tribal strife.  Unlike central and southern Africa, it does not have outrageously high HIV/AIDS rates and life expectancy lags not far behind that in Europe or the United States.

The spotlight now turns to Mahama, especially if, as expected, he becomes the standard-bearer of the NDC, the party that Rawlings founded and the more social democratic of two major parties in Ghana (the other main party in Ghana’s two-party system is the more center-right New Patriotic Party of Kufuor and of Akufo-Addo).

Presidential and legislative elections are scheduled for December 7 of this year, with runoffs to follow as necessary on December 28.  Like in the United States (and unlike, say, parliamentary systems in Germany or the United Kingdom), Ghana’s president is both head of government and head of state, so the presidential race will be a huge prize. Continue reading Death of Ghana’s president John Atta Mills leaves December election unsettled →