APJ Abdul Kalam wanted to resign as President in 2006, says ex-secretary

BHUBANESWAR: The former press secretary of A P J Abdul Kalam said here on Saturday that he had thought of resigning as president in 2006 when the Supreme Court quashed the presidential proclamation dissolving the Bihar assembly.

S M Khan said that Kalam was reluctant to sign the proclamation initially.

After then Bihar governor Buta Singh recommended dissolution of the assembly, the Union cabinet approved it and forwarded it to him for approval when he was on a visit to Moscow.

Recalling his days with the late President in a lecture titled "My Days with the Greatest Human Soul Ever" at the SOA University, Khan, presently director general of the Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI), said when the SC quashed the proclamation, Kalam was apologetic, saying he should have rejected the cabinet's decision and thought of resigning.

"He even consulted his elder brother in Rameswaram. But he finally decided against any such step as it would have led to a constitutional crisis," Khan said.

Khan also narrated how the tech savvy President once made a two-hour-long Power Point presentation to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his cabinet colleagues on his vision of a developed India in 2020, a pet theme for him till the last.

Khan said Kalam had a penchant for power point presentations and would insist on the same even when he was meeting foreign dignitaries and heads of states. When former US President George Bush visited him in 2006, he made him sit through a presentation. "After the presentation ended, Bush told him," Sir, I need to be a scientist to understand this. But we will work on this," Khan recalled.