Bureau Report
NEW DELHI: A woman from India’s tribal minority, Droupadi Murmu, was elected as the country’s president Thursday with the backing of the ruling party, making her the first person from the marginalised community to occupy the top post.
Murmu, who is from the Santhal tribe, secured the largely ceremonial position with the support of more than half the electorate of MPs and state legislators, partial results released by the election commission showed. Murmu, 64, was nominated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the post.
Modi tweeted to congratulate Murmu, saying her “exemplary success motivates each and every Indian”.
“She has emerged as a ray of hope for our citizens, especially the poor, marginalised and the downtrodden.”
Her closest rival, the opposition-backed Yashwant Sinha — an ex-member of the BJP and former finance and external affairs minister, also tweeted his congratulations.
“India hopes that as the 15th President of the Republic she functions as the custodian of the Constitution without fear or favour,” Sinha wrote.
Murmu will be the country’s second woman president after Pratibha Patil, who held the position for five years from 2007, and succeeds Ram Nath Kovind, the second president from the Dalit community, the bottom of the Hindu caste system.
Born in Mayurbhanj district in the eastern state of Odisha, the president-elect began her career as a schoolteacher before joining politics.
She has held ministerial positions in the state government, and been governor of the neighbouring state of Jharkhand.
“As a tribal woman from remote Mayurbhanj district, I had not thought about becoming the candidate for the top post,” she told reporters soon after her nomination this month.
Murmu’s win was considered a certainty because of the strength of the ruling BJP and its allies in the parliament and state assemblies.
gnize the “independence and sovereignty” of Ukraine’s Russia-backed eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions, becoming the first country to recognize the two breakaway states’ independence. That led Ukraine to sever ties with Syria. “The Syrian Arab Republic has decided to break diplomatic relations with Ukraine in conformity with the principle of reciprocity,” a Syrian Foreign Ministry statement said.
It said that Ukraine had in reality ruptured relations with Syria in 2018, when it refused to revalidate residencies of Syrian diplomatic staff in Kyiv, making it impossible for them to carry out their duties. It said that the Syrian Embassy at that time suspended its duties “as a result of the hostile attitudes of the Ukrainian government.” Wednesday’s announcement came as Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad was in Tehran to meet with Iranian officials, a day after a summit meeting between the leaders of Russia, Iran and Turkey was held in Tehran. In only his second trip abroad since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Putin conferred with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the conflict in Syria. –Agencies
