Rising From Below

DRAUPADI MURMU is known to have never given anyone the cold shoulder. So when Dusmanta Das, her neighbour from Rairangpur in Odisha, got to know that she was named the presidential nominee of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), he called to congratulate her. He asked her if she would meet him and others from Rairangpur when they came to New Delhi after she became president. “‘Definitely,’ she replied,” says Das.

He is confident that she will keep her word. Those who have known Murmu as Jharkhand’s governor recall that during her tenure, the doors of Raj Bhavan were open to all, even a commoner. It was in Jharkhand that she proved her mettle. She had put on the back burner amendments made by the BJP-led government to the decades-old Chota Nagpur Tenancy (CNT) Act, 1908, allowing tribal land to be used for development purposes without change in ownership. The amendments had sparked off unrest among tribals and given ammunition to the opposition, who saw it as an attempt to dilute the rights of tribals in a state where the community comprises nearly 23 per cent of the population. Then Chief Minister Raghubar Das dubbed it as a campaign by the opposition to malign his government. While the CNT Act bars non-tribals from purchasing tribal land on the Chhotanagpur Plateau, the Santhal Pargana Tenancy (SPT) Act, 1949 prohibits land transfers in the Santhal Pargana division where CNT is not applicable. Murmu, it is understood, had asked the Raghubar Das government to spell out how the amendments to CNT would be in the larger interests of tribals across the state.

Low-profile and soft-spoken, Murmu had generally steered clear of controversy, but her refusal to sign the amendments had pushed BJP to rethink its strategy on the issue. That she was herself a tribal from Odisha may have just been incidental, but she was seen as the state’s first tribal governor and someone who would not let the community down. She was also the only governor in politically volatile Jharkhand, which has had 10 governments in its two decades of existence, to complete a full term in the post. “She is simple, strong and gentle,” is how former Chief Minister Das describes her. He says she focused a lot on education, particularly of tribals, and ensured the setting up of the jan jaati bhasha (tribal languages) department at Ranchi University.

When Murmu, 64, was chosen as NDA’s nominee for president, it did not raise many eyebrows. In 2017, BJP had selected a rather unknown politician, Ram Nath Kovind, a Dalit party leader, for the post, springing a surprise. Murmu’s name had figured even then on NDA’s shortlist. It was Kovind who finally emerged as the dark horse. As during the nomination of Kovind, who was governor of Bihar, Murmu’s candidature is being described by political pundits as a “master stroke” by BJP. Murmu, if elected, will be the country’s first president from the tribal community, and the second woman to be elected to the post. Both Murmu and Kovind come from humble backgrounds, quite the antithesis of their challengers. Kovind was pitted against former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, who is also a Dalit but had begun her career with the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and is the daughter of Congress leader Jagjivan Ram. Murmu, born into a modest Santhali family at Uperbeda village of Mayurbhanj district, is facing the opposition’s candidate Yashwant Sinha, a former BJP leader who belongs to an upper-caste family from today’s Jharkhand and was in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) for nearly two decades before he joined politics. Emerging from the grassroots, unassuming and self-made, Murmu is the quintessential candidate for the presidential post in the Narendra Modi regime that has been striving to strike a chord with the marginalised.

The Santhals, the third largest Scheduled Tribe (ST) in India, after the Gonds and Bhils, are spread over the states of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, none of which is governed by BJP at present. Murmu’s candidature has made it difficult for Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), which owes its political clout largely to tribal support, to back Sinha, although he too is from Jharkhand. Like Murmu, the Sorens also belong to the Santhal tribe and have family connections with Rairangpur in Mayurbhanj which has the largest concentration of Santhals, a community with a higher literacy rate compared to other tribes. Besides, the Soren regime has had a rather cordial relationship with her as governor. Murmu already has the support of Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Patnaik, one of the first to back Murmu, who was a minister with independent charge of various ministries in the BJD-BJP government in the state from 2000 to 2004, tweeted recently that he had spoken to her and told her that he would work towards getting her every vote from Odisha. For Patnaik, besides this being “a proud moment” for his state, a tribal woman president fits well with his plank of women’s empowerment. In the last General Election, Patnaik had sent a self-help group worker, Pramila Bisoyi, a political greenhorn, to Lok Sabha from his old seat of Aska.

The numbers appear to be clearly in Murmu’s favour. In the several unanticipated twists and turns in her personal and political life, becoming a presidential nominee is, perhaps, the most unforeseen. Born into a farmer’s home, she persisted with her studies even though she had to leave her village to do so after Class 7. With the help of relatives she completed her schooling in Bhubaneswar and then joined Rama Devi Women’s College, which is now a university. “She was good at studies and would take part in competitions. I remember her playing the lead role in a play,” says Santhali litterateur and Padma Shri Damayanti Besra, who was Murmu’s junior in college.

After her studies, Murmu got a job with the state irrigation and power department. She, however, quit the job after she got married to Shyam Charan Murmu, a bank employee, and moved to Rairangpur, a town about 20 km from her native village. She started teaching at the Sri Aurobindo Integral Education and Research Centre at Rairangpur. It was here that her work with a Santhal organisation, where she had enrolled in the 1990s, caught the attention of Rajkishore Das who was with BJP, a party that in those days did not have much political influence in the state. Seeing potential in Murmu, he asked her to contest for councillor in the Rairangpur Notified Area Council (NAC). In 1997, she became councillor, and later vice chairperson of the Rairangpur Corporation. There began her political journey and she won two consecutive Assembly elections from Rairangpur in 2000 and 2004. In 2007, she was conferred the Nilkantha Award for best MLA by the Odisha Legislative Assembly. Murmu is said to have played a significant role in promoting Santhali, which was included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 2003 when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government was in power at the Centre. Santhali was an oral language till 1925 when its script Ol Chiki was developed by Pandit Raghunath Murmu. Draupadi Murmu did not contest the Assembly elections of 2009, held after BJP and BJD had parted ways, and lost in 2014 to BJD’s Saiba Sushil Kumar Hansdah.

She did not contest elections again. She had suffered a series of personal tragedies—the death of her two sons (one in 2009, under mysterious circumstances, and the other in a road accident in 2013) and her husband’s death of cardiac arrest (in 2014). After 2009, life had taken a spiritual turn for Murmu, who joined the Brahma Kumaris movement and started practising Raja Yoga meditation, which can be done with eyes open and without rituals. Her neighbour, Das, recalls that shattered by the loss, she wanted to give up politics at that time. “We all advised her against it. Joining the Brahma Kumaris helped her to deal with her pain, and she still regularly goes to their centre in Rairangpur to practise their technique of meditation.” After her husband’s death, she wanted to sell some property and waited outside the sub-collector’s office like anyone else. Tribals can sell land to non-tribals only with the revenue officer’s approval.
Her daughter Itishree, a bank employee, in interviews to the media, has spoken of how her mother showed “exemplary composure” in the face of challenges. Murmu, mostly seen wearing traditional Odia saris in shades of white, picked up the threads and returned to work. As Besra says, she put her sadness behind and was always seen smiling.

In 2015, she was made governor of Jharkhand when the Raghubar Das government was in office and her tenure continued till 2021. The Hemant Soren government came to power, defeating BJP, in 2019. “She was fair-minded, soft-spoken and had a good understanding of the administration. She did not interfere in general governance, but when she felt a government did not take the right decision, she would return the bill,” says Saryu Rai, who had held several ministerial portfolios in the Das government.

An aide in the former chief minister’s office recalls that she was accessible, not just for politicians and officials but also for ordinary people and was always punctual for her meetings and public engagements. Sometimes, there would be a whiff of her own purely vegetarian cooking wafting from the kitchen, particularly during festivals and on special occasions. She ensured that only vegetarian meals were cooked at Raj Bhavan. Her next destination, in all likelihood, is Rashtrapati Bhavan.

“It’s a master stroke by Modi, sending a political message to the downtrodden. He has brought tribals into the larger Hindu fold, deterring them from converting to Christianity. Santhals are a dominant community among tribals, over whom Congress had a sway. But it’s unlikely that Congress can regain its hold over Odisha now,” says political analyst Rabi Das.

As Murmu filed her nomination papers for the presidential election in Delhi, dressed in a white sari with a thin green border and a white long-sleeved blouse, there were celebrations at Rairangpur, with folk dance, drums and crackers. “We had met her on the night of the announcement. She told us ‘Aap logon ki kripa se (It’s with your blessings)’. The next day there were too many people at her house. Then she left for Delhi. Didi was one of us all these years, through her rise in politics, becoming a minister and then governor. But now there will be protocols once she is in Rashtrapati Bhavan,” says Kuanar Giri, a neighbour from Rairangpur. Yet, somewhere within, he hopes she will continue to be one of them.

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