Zakir Hussain was the third President of India | First Muslim President of India

 May 13 Birth Day; Zakir Husain was     the third President of India

Dr Zakir Husain was the third President of India and the first Muslim to occupy that post. He was a renowned educationist and intellectual and his contribution in the development of modern India through education is invaluable. From young age, Zakir Husain developed a fascination for politics which he strived to fulfil through education. He slowly and steadily climbed up the social ladder as an educationist and soon became one of the most prominent educational thinkers and practitioners of modern India. Husain strongly believed in the fact that national renaissance could not be attained through active politics all alone. He understood the importance that education would play and thus, indulged himself completely in it. For 22 years, he served as Vice Chancellor of Jamia Milia Islamia, making it one of the most distinguished centres of learning. He spent his entire life working for the cause of education and value of secularism. For his services to the country he was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest national honour.


CAREER

• In 1920, he led a small group of students and teachers and together they founded the National Muslim University at Aligarh in October 1920. Five years later, they shifted the university to Karol Bagh before finally shifting it to Jamia Nagar in New Delhi, where it eventually was re-christened as Jamia Milia University.
  
• For two years, from 1920 to 1922, he took up the position of a teacher at Jamia Milia University. However, his deep embedded interest in education invoked yet again and he moved to Germany to gain his PhD degree in Economics from the Frederick William University of Berlin, which he eventually bagged in 1926.
  
• It was in Germany that he came out with a collection of the best works of the greatest Urdu poet Mirza Assadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’.
  
• Upon returning to India, while other political bigwigs actively involved themselves in politics and Mahatama Gandhi’s Swaraj and Civil Disobedience Movement, he took a different approach and aimed to contribute in the freedom struggle by using education as the chief tool.
  
• In 1927, He took over as the head of Jamia Milia Islamia University, which had steeply declined in popularity and was facing the threat of closure due to financial constraints. He aimed to revive the university.
  
• For the next twenty-two years, he tirelessly worked uplifting the academic and managerial standard of the university. It was under his leadership that the educational institute not just managed to stay afloat, but contributed in the Indian struggle for freedom from the British Rule.
  
• The educational institute under his leadership stuck to its objective of spreading education among the masses. He strongly believed in the fact that national renaissance could not just be gained through active politics all alone. Reformative education would play a dominant role as well.
  
• As an educator and teacher, he propagated the teaching of Mahatma Gandhi and Hakim Ajmal Khan and experimented with value-based education. No sooner, he became one of the most celebrated educational thinkers of the country
  
• He thence became an active member of initializing several educational reform movements in India. It was due to his constant and untiring efforts that he gained appreciation from arch political rivals like Mohammad Ali Jinnah as well.
  
• In 1937, when Congress won a majority and successfully formed an interim government, a national educational conference was called upon to establish a national policy of education. He along with Gandhi supported a work-centred education instead of the book-centred one.
  
• On October 23, 1937, he was elected as the Chairman of the Education Committee. His work involved formulating a scheme of basic education as discussed in the conference. He submitted his report on December 1937.
  
• In 1948, soon after India gained independence, he became the Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University, which faced a crisis situation, as some of its teachers were actively involved in the partition of the country and vouched their support for creation of a separate state of Pakistan.
  
• Following his term as a Vice Chancellor, he was nominated to the Upper House of the Parliament in 1956. However, just after a year of being a Rajya Sabha member, he was appointed as the Governor of State of Bihar, a position he served for five years, from 1957 to 1962.
  
• In 1962, he was appointed as the Vice President of India. He held the profile for a full five year term, before being elected to the chair of the President of India on May 13, 1967. With this, he created history by being the first Muslim to occupy such a prestigious post.
  
• During his presidential tenure, he marvelled all with his gentleness, courteousness and sense of humanity. He was kind and tender to all irrespective of their social, political and economic status. He led four state visits to Hungary, Yugoslavia, USSR and Nepal.

In November 1948, Dr. Zakir Hussain was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University. He was also nominated a member of the Indian Universities Commission. The World University Service made him the Chairman of the Indian National Committee and in 1954 he was elected the World President of the organization. He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha and made the Indian representative on the Executive Board of the UNESCO from 1956 to 1958. He remained the Chairman, Central Board of Secondary Education, till 1957, a member of the University Grants Commission till 1957, a member of the University Education Commission in 1948-1949 and of the Educational Reorganisation Committee of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. In 1957 he was appointed the Governor of Bihar and in 1962 he was declared elected as the Head of the State and was formally sworn in as the Third President of the Indian Republic four days later. He held the highest office of the country with exemplary grace and dignity till his sudden death on 3 May, 1969.

Dr. Zakir Hussain was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 1954 and Bharat Ratna in 1963. He was awarded D.Litt. (Honoris Causa) by the Universities of Delhi, Calcutta, Aligarh, Allahabad and Cairo.

Many demands were made on Dr. Zakir Hussain's time and he was not able to undertake many scholarly projects which he had in mind. His interest in literary and academic work was so keen that he translated Plato's 'Republic' and Cannon's 'Elementary Political Economy'into Urdu soon after joining the Jamia Millia in 1920. While in Germany, he got an edition of the 'Diwan-I-Ghalib' printed - doing much of the compositing himself, because the press did not have enough staff - and also brought out a book in German on Mahatma Gandhi (Die Botschaft des Mahatma Gandhi') . He delivered a series of lectures on economics under the auspices of the Hindustani Academy and another series in English, on Capitalism: Essays in Understanding, under the auspices of the Delhi University in 1945. He also translated Friedrich List's 'Nationalockonomic'. His Convocation Addresses have been collected and published under the title "The Dynamic University". But he excelled in writing for children and his stories are masterpieces of style.

Tall, well-built, fair in complexion, with anoble forehead, a sensitive aristocratic nose, a well-trimmed beard and always neatly and tastefully dressed in sherwani and pyjama, Dr. Zakir Hussain was an imposing embodiment of culture and refinement. He was sensitive to beauty in all its forms and had an intense passion for excellence. His varied tastes and hobbies, his love of roses, his collection of cacti, fossils, paintings and specimens of calligraphy, objets d'art, and curios and above all, his rich library are evidence of his versatile personality.

He was steeped in the spiritual and aesthetic culture and the ethical principles of the Muslim Sufis and poets. He had the sufi's indifference towards the externals of religion and, though a deeply religious man, his religiosity was never obvious. It was the inspiration for secularism by which he endeared himself to men of different religious communities.

Dr. Zakir Hussain's nationalism was, like Gandhiji's, a reflection of his allegiance to the highest moral values and to the ideals of a culture which had become the whole of his own self. It was a nationalism which demanded for the individual that freedom which is the essence of democracy, that self-discipline which is the foundation of democratic citizenship and that identification with the good of the society which gives substance and meaning to the life of the individual.