Do we like A. P. J. Abdul Kalam?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent on both tests with no harmful words found, held back from the top because the sourced record is thin and a few calls are contested.
Kalam is the Tamil Nadu boy who sold newspapers at ten to help his family and ended up as India's President. He made his name as a missile and defence scientist, which is why he's still called the Missile Man. By the accounts we could open, he lived simply, with his possessions reportedly down to books, a veena and a few sets of clothes.
The big stoush of his presidency was Bihar in 2005. The Bihar governor recommended dissolving the state assembly, the federal Cabinet approved it, and Kalam signed the proclamation while he was in Moscow. In October 2005 a five-judge Supreme Court bench ruled the dissolution unconstitutional. His press secretary later said Kalam felt he should have rejected the Cabinet's advice and even thought about quitting, though he stayed because resigning would have caused bigger constitutional trouble.
He also pushed back on Parliament once. In May 2006 he refused to sign the office-of-profit bill, which would have shielded MPs holding certain posts from disqualification, and sent it back. He questioned its retrospective effect and whether the criteria were fair across states. Whether you read that as a President doing his job or overstepping depends on your politics, but it shows he wasn't just a rubber stamp.
On the harm check, we found nothing nasty from him about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or minorities, and nothing about conspiracies or culture-war grievance. We also found nothing either way on LGBTQ+ rights, so that's a gap rather than a tick. The planet record is mixed in a useful way: he backed nuclear power, including Kudankulam during the 2011 village protests, but also pushed renewables.
The nuclear stance is where the fair argument is. After visiting Kudankulam in 2011 he said the plant was safe and called nuclear power “a clean and green energy”, while villagers feared a repeat of Fukushima. In 2006 he proposed lifting renewables from about five per cent of India's power to 25 per cent. Where you land depends on whether you see nuclear as a climate fix or a risk.
The good stuff is what he did with money. Several outlets report he put his entire presidential salary and savings into a trust for rural development, PURA, an idea he floated in his book Target 3 Billion. We couldn't open anything on his wider charity, so we leave it at that.