Ram Nath Kovind Will be the 14th President of The Nation

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Ram Nath Kovind will be the 14th President of the country following in the footsteps of incumbent President Pranab Mukherjee. Kovind (71), the NDA candidate, won the Presidential contest after beating Meira Kumar, who was the Opposition candidate, garnering two-thirds of the vote.

 At the end of counting on Thursday, Kovind had received over 7 lakh votes indicating about 65 per cent of the votes cast while Kumar lagged far behind with just 3.6 lakh votes. Kovind, a BJP leader who has served as a Rajya Sabha MP and later was appointed the Governor of Bihar, will be the second Dalit President of the country after KR Narayanan. 

He is also the first BJP leader to be elected to the highest office of the land. Kovind’s victory was a foregone conclusion due to the NDA’s numerical strength in Parliament and the backing of non-NDA parties like the BJD, JD(U), TRS and AIADMK. Kumar, the former Lok Sabha Speaker, had said the contest was a ‘battle of ideologies.”

While the NDA candidate got the votes of 522 MPs of Parliament, Kumar was able to get only 225 MPs to vote for her. In NDA-ruled states like Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat and Jharkhand, Kovind was able to beat Kumar convincingly. In states like West Bengal (TMC-ruled), Karnataka (Cong-ruled) and Punjab (Cong-ruled), Kumar was able to get more votes than Kovind.

 A total of 4,896 voters — 4,120 MLAs and 776 elected MPs– were eligible to cast their ballot. MLCs of states with legislative council are not part of the electoral college.

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