How the Droupadi Murmu vs Yashwant Sinha presidential campaign played out | Latest News India - Hindustan Times
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How the Droupadi Murmu vs Yashwant Sinha presidential campaign played out

Jul 18, 2022 11:28 AM IST

After frantic efforts by Opposition parties to find a suitable nominee, Sinha’s candidature highlighted Opposition unity. However, for him, the race is over even before it started, as the BJP is set to have an easy win with Murmu. 

New Delhi: When Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Gopalkrishna Gandhi withdrew his candidature from the Presidential race on June 20, Opposition strategists found themselves in deep water. Almost sure of him, the 17 Opposition parties had called their final meeting next day, June 21, to announce Gandhi as their common candidate.

NDA presidential candidate Droupadi Murmu and the Opposition nominee Yashwant Sinha.  (File Photos) PREMIUM
NDA presidential candidate Droupadi Murmu and the Opposition nominee Yashwant Sinha.  (File Photos)

Frantic efforts to find a suitable nominee in less than 24 hours led to former National Democratic Alliance (NDA) minister Yashwant Sinha, perhaps the only national-level leader willing to fight an election that the ruling dispensation will win. Sinha’s candidature was aimed to highlight Opposition’s unity and grit to wage an ideological battle.

Instead, people saw three Opposition nominees refusing to contest and four Opposition parties switching sides to support NDA’s Droupadi Murmu.

The Opposition’s eagerness to announce their candidate first also seriously damaged the political optics of the election: It came across as supporting an upper caste man against a tribal woman who will be India’s first such woman leader to become the President.

A few days later, sensing the political miscalculation, Mamata Banerjee, India’s lone woman chief minister, quipped that her party would have supported Murmu had the government discussed her name with the Opposition. Her party m even suggested to Sinha that he could avoid coming to Bengal for campaign.

Easy win for the BJP

Obviously, as the campaign proceeded, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was upbeat. “The question is not who will win but how wide the margin of victory will be,” a senior BJP leader said speaking about the expectations from the July 18 presidential election that will see NDA’s Droupadi Murmu contest against the Opposition’s Yashwant Sinha for the top constitutional position.

Naveen Patnaik’s Biju BJD, Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP, Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP, Congress ally in Jharkhand—Hemant Soren’s JMM—Shiv Sena and even the Akali Dal announced their support for Murmu, ensuring her easy victory.

Even before the nominations were announced, the party was confident of being able to drum up support for its presidential election nominee even though it fell short of the necessary votes in the electoral college. The NDA had 533,751 votes but now the support has swelled beyond 6,52,000 votes.

Banking on the support of friendly parties such as YSRCP and the BJD and the NDA allies, the party was expecting that election to the top constitutional position would be a cakewalk for its nominee.

The politics of Presidential poll

The nomination of Murmu is also a signal to the vast Scheduled Tribe voters, spread across states such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and North East India. In Lok Sabha there are 47 ST seats, constituting 8.6% of the 543 seats in the Lower House. There are 556 assembly seats reserved for STs.

In states such as Rajasthan, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh where ST population is a significant percentage of the electorate the BJP is confident that cross-voting will add to widen the margin between Murmu and Sinha. “There is no party whip that applies to voting for the presidential candidate and some of our senior leaders in the states have conveyed a sense of solidarity and support for Murmu among the opposition camp,” said the second leader.

With the nomination of Droupadi Murmu, the party’s expectation do not seem wide off the mark.

Murmu, who hails from the Santhal tribe, is the first woman from a scheduled tribe community to be nominated for the presidential election. With her nomination the BJP not only struck a blow at its opponents who accuse it of being an upper caste, patriarchal party but also engineered a split in the larger coalition of parties shepherded by the Trinamool Congress

Opposition in disarray

Several opposition parties were forced to reconsider their support for Sinha and announce their preference for Murmu.

“Many leaders in the opposition parties, especially the Congress said Droupadi Murmu’s nomination is symbolic or just for optics. They fail to recognise the Bharatiya Janata party’s commitment towards the marginalised, the women, and those sections of society who have not been politically empowered over the years. With her nomination, the BJP has shown that it walks the talk on ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas',” said a BJP leader.

He was referring to parties such as the JMM and the Shiv Sena that had to break away from the opposition coalition and announced support for Murmu. Even the TDP, which has an uneasy relation with the BJP and was the first to quit the NDA in 2018 has pledged support for Murmu.

The JMM could not have risked upsetting its core vote bank by backing Sinha and so they made a politically expedient decision to announce support for Murmu.

Similarly, anticipating a backlash among the cadre over its decision not to support Murmu, former Maharashtra chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, who is the leader of one of the Shiv Sena factions also relented and decided to announce his support for her candidature.

Thackeray’s decision to back Murmu created unease in the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition but both sides have refrained from commenting publicly about the volte face. A senior Sena leader said the party is well within its rights to show support to a candidate of its choosing and how in the past it had opted to not support the NDA candidate even though it was part of the alliance. The SS had voted for Pratibha Patil and Pranab Mukherjee though these were candidates nominated by the UPA.

Apart from the Opposition parties that have had to make a public declaration of support, the BJP is also eyeing support from other lawmakers and legislators, who the party is confident will go against the party line and vote for Murmu.

For Sinha, the race is over even before it started. The only consolation prize he can chase is to ensure an honourable margin of defeat.

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    Saubhadra Chatterji is Deputy Political Editor at the Hindustan Times. He writes on both politics and policies.

  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    Smriti covers an intersection of politics and governance. Having spent over a decade in journalism, she combines old fashioned leg work with modern story telling tools.

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