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By Mari Marcel Thekaekara K R Narayanan, India's first and only dalit President, died recently. In this, one of his final interviews, India's tenth President discusses his journey from a village hut to the presidential palace
 The contradiction confounds you. A dalit President. In a country where dalits are killed, humiliated, raped, tortured routinely, every day and with impunity, a dalit is elected to the highest post in the land.
Of course, governments are notorious for tokenism, showcasing their support for minorities through figurehead appointments. India has developed this into a fine art. Thus the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made a Muslim, President. But in Kocheril Raman Narayanan, India’s first and only dalit President, they got more than they bargained for. He refused to be a rubber stamp President and in his five-year tenure, confounded his critics by speaking out about things that mattered and earning himself the reputation of being one of the Republic’s finest Presidents. India’s 10th President was elected to office in an unprecedented social revolution, winning 95% of the votes, defeating his rival T N Seshan, a formidable, feisty Brahmin Election Commissioner who’d put the fear of God into Indian politicians. The defeated candidate angrily dismissed the decision. KRN won, Seshan pointed out, “only because he was a dalit.” Six days before Narayanan became President, police opened fire on a dalit protest killing nine unarmed dalits. Another day in the life of the Indian police. In his acceptance speech KRN noted, “That the nation has found for its highest office, someone who has sprung from the grassroots is symbolic of the fact that the concerns of the common man have now moved to the centrestage of our political life. It is this larger significance of my election rather than any personal sense of honour that makes me rejoice on this occasion.” From a village hut to the Presidential Palace in Delhi is a long way.
“How did it happen?” I asked. “Frankly, I don’t know. I did not really try for these things, aim for anything very big. Most things came by chance, a combination of circumstances, rather than my effort. I cannot explain these things. Except that I experienced the problems, I suffered as a dalit, had my share of humiliation, but I did not view myself as a suffering dalit. I did not have a feeling of bitterness. “Living in a small village, there was diversity and discrimination. But not of such intensity as the atrocities that one hears of nowadays. My village had several castes and the attendant problems but when I look back on it, the stories of rapes and atrocities were not that common. “How I got out of it was, I always wanted to study. I intensely wanted to study. This ultimately lifted me out of the village rut. There was a Malayalam primary school in my village. My family was slightly progressive. My uncle was a primary school teacher. There were several times when I could have dropped out. These were critical times. These were not caste-related incidents.” Interviewing him was an emotional experience. Before me the 84-year-old ex-President. And through his unfolding story, the little dalit boy, humiliated at every step. “We had to pay fees and father had very little money,” he reminisced. “The management cooperated up to a point, but after months of no fees they sent me home. Father scraped together a little money and sent me back. It was always touch and go. Frequently I had to stand in the corner for non-payment of fees, or stand on the bench.” Later, when he moved to Kottayam to study, the perennial problem of poverty loomed threateningly overhead. “My uncle knew a government pleader. He wrote him a letter asking if I could eat with his family. ‘Can you help my nephew so he can continue his studies,’ my uncle wrote. I was very shy about going to someone for food. “My good friend Mathew came with me. I was outside the door with the letter saying, I don’t want to go in. Mathew pushed me in. Literally physically gave me a push so I fell inside the door. The lawyer said, ‘Just a minute, let me consult my wife.’ He went inside, came back and said, ‘You can come for lunch and dinner every day.’ He was an exceptionally good man.” Narayanan’s Republic Day speech made waves. He departed from the norm of pompous platitudes, angering those who favoured a constitutional cocktail party Head of State who limited his duties to lunching and dining visiting dignitaries.
He outraged Indian and American diplomats by gently pointing out to visiting President Clinton “the fact that the world is now a global village does not mean it will have one village headman.” And “the danger is not from us who have declared solemnly that we will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but rather from those who refuse to make any such commitment.” All this in an exchange of toasts! And ended quoting Thoreau, “it takes two to speak the truth, one to speak and another to hear.” In his 2001 address to the nation he raised sensitive issues which few other leaders would touch, the Narmada Dam for one “ It is well known how the large river valley projects are uprooting the tribals and causing them untold misery. Let it not be said by future generations that the Indian Republic has been built on the destruction of the green earth and the innocent tribals who have been living there for centuries.” And in a sharp rejoinder to the prime minister who called for constitutional amendments he rebuked, “it is not the Constitution that has failed us, it is we who have failed the Constitution.” His 2002 speech was equally strong. “We have to draw lessons from those who analysed the causes of our decline and degradation. Swami Vivekananda declared that the chief cause of India’s ruin has been the monopolising of the whole education and intelligence of the land by a handful of men.” And “all have trampled them (the masses) under foot.” “The discrimination being suffered by women, the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes is a crying denial of the democracy that is enshrined in our Constitution.” Quoting the Bhopal Declaration, “it is necessary for the private sector to adopt social policies that are progressive and egalitarian for these deprived classes to be uplifted from their deprivation and inequality and given the rights of citizens and civilised human beings.” President Narayanan was a President we could be proud of. He took his role as protector of the Constitution seriously (This interview first appeared in New Internationalist, July 2005)
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