India’s first female President, Pratibha Patil, savoured her election win on Sunday as supporters hailed the victory as a significant step forward for women in the South Asian nation.
The 72-year-old lawyer defeated Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat by a landslide on Saturday for the largely ceremonial post of head of state of the world’s largest democracy.
Supporters and workers of the ruling Congress party that backed Patil thronged her house in New Delhi on Sunday. Many wore bright turbans and carried flowers to celebrate the occasion.
After the results were announced on Saturday, supporters danced and burst firecrackers in the streets of the capital, as a beaming Patil thanked federal and state legislators who formed the electorate.
”I am grateful to the voters … I am grateful to the people of India, the men and women of India,” said Patil who officially takes over on July 25.
Analysts and supporters described her win as a significant step forward for women in a nation where millions face violence, discrimination and poverty.
”Patil’s election win is of huge symbolic value” for women, said political analyst Rasheed Kidwai. ”Though Patil does not wield much power, she is the first woman head of the state.”
Patil, governor of the north-western state of Rajasthan, was plucked from relative political obscurity by Sonia Gandhi, the powerful president of the ruling Congress party.
”In the 60th year of our independence, for the first time, we have a woman president and I want to thank our alliance partners and all those who voted for her,” Gandhi said on Saturday.
Her party’s Communist allies agreed, adding that she would hopefully help dispel a widespread belief that a woman’s place was in the home.
”We are living in a society where still a large body of opinion believes that the place of the woman is in the home,” said Brinda Karat, a politburo member of Communist Party of India.
”Here you are trying to bring more women into public life and the fact you have a woman as the president of this country is symbolic of that … and the aspirations of women for equality,” Karat said.
Patil, a native of western Maharashtra state, secured 66% of the votes cast, said returning officer PDT Achary.
The new president, who cuts a conservative figure with her sari pulled over her hair, survived a bruising campaign by the Hindu nationalist opposition to emerge victorious.
She was buffeted by accusations that she protected her brother in a murder probe and shielded her husband in a suicide scandal. There were also charges of nepotism and involvement in a slew of financial scams.
And she was mocked for revelations that she had experienced a ”divine revelation of greater responsibility”.
Critics also said Patil, a staunch Congress party loyalist, would be a pawn of the ruling coalition.
Constitutional expert Fali Nariman said Patil, as president, would have to take the lead in narrowing the differences among various political groups.
”She is now the people’s president and so she must reach out to the opposition and take them along as she goes,” he said.
Under the Constitution, the prime minister has executive power but the president plays a role in forming governments at state and federal levels, making the post hotly contested.
Even though she has spent 45 years in politics, Patil was an obscure figure nationally until her nomination vaulted her to the newspaper front-pages. – AFP