Droupadi Murmu  Trounces  Yashwant Sinha In Presidential Polls

Even as counting of votes of MPs from seven states was completed by late afternoon on the 21^st of July 2022, it became evident that the NDA candidate for president of India, Mrs. Droupadi Murmu, had achieved a very substantial win. Projections gave her 70% of the vote at close.

Tribals from multiple states all over the country, particularly from Murmu’s Santhal community, people from her home town in Odisha, dressed in traditional finery, were first off the mark, dancing and celebrating in front of her New Delhi residence.

The BJP HQ in New Delhi too was a sea of national and BJP flags and cries of Vande Mataram. As presidential elections to India’s highest constitutional office go, this one appears to be exhibiting a special excitement and a strong  Hindu nationalist fervour. The BJP, expecting an electoral dividend from installing the first Hindu tribal in Rashtrapati Bhavan, indicated that nation-wide celebrations in tribal areas, in multiple states, were going to follow this win.

The opposition candidate, Yashwant Sinha, a bureacrat from Bihar, erstwhile a union minister of the BJP from the Vajpayee era, turned virulent critic of the Modi government, was promising an activist, politicised avatar during his campaigning that had never been exhibited before. In fact, the kind of attitude he displayed could probably not be contained in the largely ceremonial, diplomatic, and constitutional office, without causing a crisis in governance.

As it turns out, his personal ambitions, and that of the opposition parties that supported his candidature, have had to bite the dust.

If these presidential elections, and the vice-presidential ones to follow shortly, are any indication of relative strengths of the NDA versus the opposition, the electoral war against the ruling parties is lost before it has truly begun.

The vaunted opposition unity is in tatters on multiple counts, largely on questions of its leadership and clashing egos. The TMC has just announced, for example, that it will abstain from voting in the vice-presidential elections, because it was not consulted in the selection of the opposition candidate, Congress veteran Margaret Alva, standing against current Governor of West Bengal, Jagdeep Dhankar, who is the NDA vice-presidential candidate.  Again, Dhankar is expected to win easily, and being projected as a Jat farmer’s son, is likely to also garner an electoral dividend for the NDA.

Contests in coming assembly elections through 2022 and 2023 in a number of important states, as well as the general election in 2024, are looking like foregone conclusions, overwhelmingly in favour of the ruling dispensation.

Part of the opposition, led by Congress and the TMC from West Bengal, have adopted a highly confrontationist stance in parliament, in the states they control, and in the media. A disruption a day is the method being used in the ongoing Monsoon Session, replete with sloganeering, placards, and demands of all kinds, but without coming to the house for a reasoned debate.

This irresponsible methodology is not working well with the watching electorate, but the parties involved seem oblivious.  

In ironic juxtaposition, as it happens, on the same day as this thumping win for candidate Murmu, interim president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, is being questioned by the Enforcement Directorate on money laundering charges in the National Herald/Young Indian case.

It is a study in contrasts. The Congress leadership, accompanied by the rank and file, have been courting arrest in defiance of Section 144 applied, tear gas and water cannons. The Congress, and the Gandhis at the helm, have exhausted multiple appeals at various  tribunals and courts, including the Supreme Court, to squash these proceedings but to no avail.

Other charges, pertaining to income tax evasion in hundreds of crores in the same matter are also pending final resolution. It was as if the whole murky set of arrogant transactions were done at a time when the Congress Party assumed, so very wrongly as it turned out, that it would never be out of power. This sense of entitlement, being above the law, is totally out of place in 2022 given the prevailing political wind.

The media devoted the morning to covering this event at the AICC HQ and the ED, likely to play out similarly over the several days of questioning, and the afternoon to the presidential elections, with its evident jubilation in the government camp.

One was about anger, frustration and victimhood, the discomfort of wriggling on the end of a hook, a repeat of the days when Rahul Gandhi was being similarly questioned by the ED in the same matter, and the other was representative of a victorious prevailing trend.

Not only does the Murmu win celebrate the win of a tribal woman to the highest constitutional office in the land, but the fact that it had the backing, including rampant cross-voting, from 70% of the legislators in the country. This is notable.

The glaring exceptionalism of the Congress Party when it comes to its high command is anachronistic, and thought to be bizarre, particularly when they have lost most of their electoral power. And eight years of the Modi administration has not allowed their fortunes to revive. Their association with forces abroad out to create law and order confusion in the country is also a sinister add on.

Droupadi Murmu is the 15^th president, elected to office in India’s 75^th year of independence, and when the country is on the march towards great power status. Not only will she be expected to showcase India’s abiding and ancient value systems in the international arena, but preside over momentous events and achievements to come.

In that sense, her presidency will carve out new territory as this country continually gains in modernity, technological excellence, stature, and heft. Her presidency marks a departure from all except the three presidents that preceded her, namely APJ Abdul Kalam, Pranab Mukherjee, and Ram Nath Kovind. All three were willy-nilly part of the New India ushered in by the present regime and themselves had an attitude that was in tune with India’s  growing aspirations.

It is Murmu’s good fortune that, over the next five years, she will preside over a ship-of-state that has gained momentum over the last eight years. She will witness many changes that are transformative in nature, ones that will further distance India from the struggles of its uncertain past, a small economy, very little international influence, and the  neo-colonial hangovers of a previous order that was reluctant to find its proud and confident new voice.

It is an India that has broken away now from the old pseudo-secularist manner that was a formula for state administered discrimination against the majority of its people. It is now inclusive, but with a strong emphasis on its Hindu mainstays.

The economic growth that will take it to No.3 in the world shortly, the military  aatmanirbharta that is proceeding apace, has greatly reduced vulnerabilities.

Droupadi Murmu, an educated,  experienced tribal woman, is a symbol of all this, and destined to conduct an exemplary presidency going forward.

(1,165 words)

July 21^st, 2022

For: Firstpost/News18

Gautam Mukherjee