Indian Presidential Election 2022: Who is Droupadi Murmu?

By Editorialge Desk
June 23, 2022
Last Updated: June 23, 2022

Geopolitics, World

Droupadi Murmu is a member of the BJP, and from 2015 to 2021, she was Governor of Jharkhand. She was also the first woman to run the state as Governor.

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The parliamentary board of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) chose Droupadi Murmu, a tribal BJP leader and former Governor of Jharkhand, as its candidate for the next President of India on Tuesday. The last day to file a nomination for the presidential election is June 29. On July 18, there will be an election, and on July 21, the votes will be counted.

Who is Droupadi Murmu?

The first time Droupadi Murmu got a lot of attention was in 2017, when it was said that the BJP was considering her for the presidential election that year. She was in charge of the state of Jharkhand at the time.

Murmu was born on June 20, 1958, in the village of Baidaposi in the district of Mayurbhanj. She is a member of the Santhal community, which is one of India’s oldest and largest tribal groups.

She went to school at the Ramadevi Women’s College in Bhubaneswar, which is the capital city of the state. Her father was the head of the village council. She first worked for the government of Odisha as a clerk. From 1979 to 1983, she was a junior assistant in the irrigation and energy department.

Smt. Droupadi Murmu Ji has devoted her life to serving society and empowering the poor, downtrodden as well as the marginalised. She has rich administrative experience and had an outstanding gubernatorial tenure. I am confident she will be a great President of our nation.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 21, 2022

History of public service

From 1994 to 1997, she also worked as a teacher at the Sri Aurobindo Integral Education and Research Center in Rairangpur. In 1997, she was elected as a council member in Rairangpur, a city close to where she grew up. This was the start of her political career.

As a BJP member, she was elected to the state assembly from the Rairangpur seat twice, in 2000 and 2009. She was a minister in the coalition government of the state, which was led by Naveen Patnaik of the Biju Janata Dal party, from 2000 to 2004. At first, she was in charge of commerce and transportation. Later, she was in charge of fisheries and animal resources.

From 2006 to 2009, Murmu was president of the BJP’s state wing for “scheduled tribes.” These are tribal communities that India’s constitution says are socially and economically disadvantaged. After becoming the first woman governor of the nearby state of Jharkhand in 2015, she stopped working in politics.

She was also the first tribal leader from Odisha to be put in charge of a state. She did this job for six years, from July 2016 to July 2021.

Simple Beginnings

She started her career as a teacher at the Shri Aurobindo Integral Education Centre in Raigarh. She taught students for free because she cared so much about helping people who didn’t have much.

Ministries Murmu handled

She has been in charge of many ministries, such as transport and commerce, fisheries, and animal husbandry. The Legislative Assembly of Odisha gave Murmu the “Nilakantha Award” for being the best MLA of 2007.

Candidate of the opposition

Earlier on Tuesday, the opposition parties said that Yashwant Sinha, a former Union minister, would be their choice for President.

“We (opposition parties) all agreed that Yashwant Sinha will be our common candidate for President,” Congress leader Jairam Ramesh told the media right after the meeting of opposition parties at the Parliament Annexe.

Here is some things you need to know about the BJP’s presidential candidate:

If elected, Murmu would be the first President from a tribal group and the second President of India to be a woman.
She has been an MLA from Rairangpur in Mayurbhanj twice, both times on the BJP ticket (2000 and 2009).
Five years ago, when President Pranab Mukherjee was about to leave Rashtrapati Bhavan, Murmu was first seen as a possible candidate.
She was in charge of Commerce and Transport and then Fisheries and Animal Husbandry when the BJP-BJD coalition government came to power in 2000.
She was able to win in 2009, even though the BJD was much stronger than the BJP at the time.
Murmu has had a lot of bad luck in her personal life. She lost her husband, Shyam Charan Murmu, and two of her sons.
Before she became an MLA, Murmu was a councillor in the Rairangpur Nagar Panchayat and vice-president of the BJP’s Scheduled Tribes Morcha. She was elected in 1997.
The BJP’s push for tribalism will get a big boost from the fact that the NDA is expected to win 48 percent of the votes.