Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, July 21: India will get its first tribal as the first citizen of the country on July 25 when the NDA nominee Droupadi Murmu will be sworn-in as the President of India after she was declared the winner in the elections on Thursday after counting of third round of votes.
After the third round of counting of votes, Murmu had crossed 50 per cent mark securing her win in the presidential battle against joint opposition nominee Yashwant Sinha, a former union minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee cabinet, by a huge margin. Of the 3,219 valid votes counted so far, Murmu has bagged 2,161, while Sinha got 1,058. Murmu has accumulated 53.13 per cent of total vote value after three rounds of counting. There was still one more round to go, in which votes of nine states and two Union Territories will be counted.
Murmu, 64, is the first Adivasi and second woman to become the nation’s First Citizen and the Supreme Commander of India’s Armed Forces. Murmu was elected to two terms in the Odisha Assembly in 2000 and 2004, and served as a Minister from 2000 to 2004 in Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s BJD-BJP coalition government. She was sworn in as the first woman Governor of Jharkhand in 2015.
Soon after Murmu’s score crossed the halfway mark, Sinha took to twitter to congratulate her over the victory. “I join my fellow citizens in congratulating Smt Droupadi Murmu on her victory in the Presidential Election 2022. India hopes that as the 15th President of the Republic she functions as the Custodian of the Constitution without fear or favour,” he wrote.
The Nepal prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba was among the first international leaders to congratulate Murmu on her elections as the president. “On behalf of the government and people of Nepal, I would like to extend warmest congratulations to Droupadi Murmu on being elected as the 15th President of India. I am confident that the excellent bilateral relations between Nepal and India will see newer heights in the days ahead,” Deuba said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with senior members of his Cabinet and BJP chief JP Nadda, visited Ms Murmu to congratulate her. Celebrations broke out across the country, complete with sweets and colourful tribal dances.
The counting process started at 11 A.M. at the Parliament House and after preliminaries, the actual counting started at 1.30 P.M. and from the very first round the trend was clearly tilting in favour of Ms Murmu. Odisha’s Rairangpur, her hometown, broke out in celebrations as the trend became clear.
The NDA’s choice of Ms Murmu drove a wedge through the opposition and brought on board non-aligned parties, such as Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal and Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress. The move is also seen as a huge political message to the tribal community, which was lately seen as being disenchanted with the BJP. The voting figures also indicate a considerable amount of cross-voting by opposition MPs and MLAs in Ms Murmu’s favour. While parties have declared support for one candidate or the other, there is no penalty for cross-voting in the Presidential elections.
The President-elect Droupadi Murmu is an unassuming the unassuming politician who started public life as a councillor in Odisha and will be written into history as India’s first tribal president and the second woman in the post. At 64, the woman who will be India’s 15th president, taking over from Ram Nath Kovind, will also be the youngest and India’s first president to be born after Independence.
The low-profile politician is believed to be deeply spiritual and a keen practitioner of the meditation techniques of the Brahma Kumaris, a movement she embraced after she lost her husband, two sons, mother and brother in the just six years between 2009-2015.
In an interview in February 2016 to Doordarshan, Ms Murmu gave a glimpse into the tumultuous period of her life when she lost her son in 2009. “I was devastated and suffered from depression. I spent sleepless nights after my son’s death. It was when I visited Brahma Kumaris, I realised I had to move on and live for my two sons and daughter,” Ms Murmu had said.
In the month since she was nominated as the NDA’s presidential candidate on June 21, she has made no public statement.
Her first steps in politics were taken in Rairangpur where she was elected as BJP councillor in the Rairangpur Notified Area Council in 1997 and rose to being a minister in Odisha’s BJD-BJP coalition government from 2000 to 2004. In 2015, she was appointed governor of Jharkhand and stayed in the post till 2021. Murmu had contested the 2014 assembly election from Rairangpur, but lost to the BJD candidate.
Belonging to Mayurbhanj, one of the most remote and underdeveloped districts of the country, Murmu earned her Bachelor’s degree in Arts from Ramadevi Women’s College in Bhubaneswar and served as a junior assistant in the irrigation and power department in the Odisha government. She also served as an honorary assistant teacher in the Shri Aurobindo Integral Education Centre in Rairangpur.
Murmu was awarded the Nilkanth Award for the Best MLA of the year in 2007 by the Odisha Legislative assembly. She has diverse administrative experience having handled ministries such as transport, commerce, fisheries and animal husbandry in the Odisha government.
In the BJP, Murmu was vice president and later president of the Scheduled Tribe Morcha in Odisha. She was elected the district president of Mayurbhanj (West) unit of the BJP in 2010 and re-elected in 2013. She was also named member of the BJP National Executive (ST Morcha) the same year. She held the post of district president till April 2015 when she was appointed as the Governor of Jharkhand.
Murmu’s daughter Itishree works in a bank in Odisha.