A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Quotes
I was in high school when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled India's flag in New Delhi.
Kalam, A. P. J. Abdul. My Journey: Transforming Dreams into Actions. Rupa Publications, 2013.
This is another example of how President Roosevelt conducted his own international diplomacy independent of his own State Department. At the time, the U. S. State Department would not have any contact with Nehru who was in and out of British Indian jails for his anti-Colonial agitating. Roosevelt, however was a great admirer of Nehru and the Congress party and the commitment to democracy, freedom of religion, speech and the press and civil rights. Roosevelt and the American military strategic leaders were beginning to worry that China, even with help, would not be able to hold off the Japanese aggression, and India would become a frontier for the Allied war effort. The President realized that Nehru and his Congress Party were pressuring England for independence and extreme Indian nationalists were advocating non-support of the British military effort and strikes and protests to bog down the British army dealing with them instead of fighting the Japanese in Burma and elsewhere. There were a large number of Indian Brigades fighting for the British and if the Indian military volunteers were to be discouraged or boycotted, the allied war effort would suffer. So the President's style was to personally see what he could contribute over and above (and often to the distress of) his agencies established to do the job.
The Partition was accompanied by over 2 million murdered Indians as India was divided into a smaller India with almost all the Hindus and Sikhs and a slight majority of the Muslims and Pakistan with all Muslims who made that choice. Pakistan has been trying to de stabilize the area ever since to gain control of more land and became a theocracy and military dictatorship—sometimes de facto and sometimes de juro.
That is exactly what happened. However it would not happen until after the Second World War.
Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam was an Indian aerospace scientist and politician who served as the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007. He was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu and studied physics and aerospace engineering. He spent the next four decades as a scientist and science administrator, mainly at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and was intimately involved in India's civilian space programme and military missile development efforts. He thus came to be known as the Missile Man of India for his work on the development of ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology. He also played a pivotal organisational, technical, and political role in India's Pokhran-II nuclear tests in 1998, the first since the original nuclear test by India in 1974.
