Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, July 18: Voting to elect the 15th President of India ended peacefully on Monday with the members of Parliament and the members of various legislative assemblies casting their votes in the race between the NDA nominee Droupadi Murmu and the joint opposition candidate Yashwant Sinha with the scales tilted heavily in favour of the former considering the respective strength in the Electoral College of the supporters of the rival candidates.
Nearly 4,800 elected MPs and MLAs are entitled to vote in the election, but nominated MPs and MLAs, and members of Legislative Councils are not. Counting of votes will be held on July 21.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former PM Manmohan Singh were among those who cast their votes soon after polling began at 10 A.M. at the Parliament House and respective state assembly premises.
The election has coincided with the first day of Parliament’s Monsoon session. Droupadi Murmu, 64, was a strong contender for the country’s highest office before the 2017 presidential elections before Bihar Governor Ram Nath Kovind, a Dalit, was named as the government’s choice. The NDA choice of Ms Murmu – a tribal woman from Odisha and a former Jharkhand Governor – is seen as a calculated move, drawing the support not only of Jharkhand’s ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, but also Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik, seen as a fence-sitter.
Ms Murmu has also been assured of support by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who lately is seldom on the same page as ally BJP. Both factions of the Shiv Sena – whose split and the subsequent collapse of Maharashtra government dominated headlines for weeks – are also expected to support Ms Murmu.
While the Eknath Shinde faction being in alliance with the BJP was supporting the NDA candidate, the faction led by Uddhav Thackeray was also forced to shift its earlier stand of supporting the joint opposition candidate and announced its support for Mumu after 16 of the party’s 22 MPs met Thackeray and demanded that the party support the tribal woman nominee of the NDA to gain support of the tribals in the state.
The opposition settled on Mr Sinha – a former Union Minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government who later joined Trinamool Congress – after three proposed candidates said no. Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar, former Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah had all declined, citing various reasons.
The President is elected by the members of the Electoral College, comprising elected members of both houses of Parliament and legislative assemblies of all states as well as the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the Union Territory of Puducherry. No party whip can be issued for the voting in a particular way in the presidential poll.
Both the NDA and the Joint Opposition candidates in the Presidential election have deep-rooted connections with Jharkhand. NDA nominee Droupadi Murmu was the State’s Governor. She is from the Santal tribe, which has a sizeable population in Jharkhand as well as in neighbouring Odisha, from where she hails. Yashwant Sinha, the joint Opposition nominee, was an MP from Jharkhand’s Hazaribag district and was a Union Minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Cabinet.
Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and Opposition Deputy Leader O. Panneerselvam casts his vote at the State Secretariat, in Chennai wearing PPE kit as he had tested positive for COVID-19. He was one of the last MLAs to cast vote in the State and the entire polling staff was also directed to use safety kits when he entered the polling station to cast his vote.
Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) MLA Manpreet Singh Ayali boycotted the Presidential poll, saying issues related to Punjab remain unresolved and he was not consulted by his party leadership before deciding to back NDA candidate Droupadi Murmu.
The SAD has three Legislators in the 117-member Punjab Assembly. In a video message, Ayali said he was boycotting the poll as the party leadership did not consult him before deciding to extend support to Ms Murmu. However, the Dakha MLA said he has no objections to the candidature of Ms. Murmu. “But when the party decided to vote for the BJP candidate, I was not consulted. Even the Sikh community was also not consulted,” he said.
A BJP MLA from Uttar Pradesh voted in the Presidential polls from Thiruvananthapuram. BJP’s Sevapuri MLA Neel Ratan Singh Patel, who is currently undergoing an Ayurvedic treatment at a hospital in northern Palakkad district, travelled up to Thiruvananthapuram to exercise his franchise at a polling station set up at the State Assembly complex.
