In the first phase of counting, Droupadi Murmu received 378000 votes.
Droupadi Murmu has been elected as the new President of India. She will take oath later this week. The counting for the election took place on Friday. Murmu, NDA’s candidate, received a whopping 64 percent of the votes. Her opponent, Yashwant Sinha, got only 36 percent votes. Shockingly, scores of Opposition MPs and MLAs cross-voted in favour of Murmu, a tribal.
Yashwant Sinha, who had called for the election of a vocal President, didn’t receive any votes from Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland, and Sikkim. This means Murmu received all the votes in these states. Andhra’s 173 MLAs, Nagaland’s 59 MLAs, and Sikkim’s 32 MLAs voted for Droupadi Murmu.
Meanwhile, Murmu received votes in all the states, including the Congress-Left’s fiefdom, Kerala. She received one vote in the coastal state.
Yashwant Sinha, a former IAS officer and Union minister, received the support of only 9 MLAs in his home state Jharkhand. In Odisha, Murmu 137 of the state’s 147 votes.
She, however, received lesser votes than Ramnath Kovind who had got 65.65 percent votes. Murmu’s exact vote percentage was 64.03 percent. Yashwant Sinha, however, received more votes than the UPA nominee Meira Kumar.
In the first phase of counting, Murmu received 378000 votes. In the second, she received the votes of 809 MLAs. By the third and final phase, she received 2,161 votes.
Murmu will be the first tribal President of India. Before her, only one woman had been the president — Pratibha Patil. Murmu was the Governor of Jharkhand. Before that, she was an Odisha BJP leader.
