Murmu as President

The election of Draupadi Murmu as the fifteenth President of India is a historic event. Though she is not the first woman to have been elected to the highest Constitutional position of the country (Pratibha Patil was the 12th President, and had remained in office from July 2007 to July 2012), Murmu happens to be the first from any tribal community to have become the President of the world's largest democracy. While the tribal communities across the country have rejoiced at her election, for the North-eastern Region, which has the highest number of tribal communities, it is definitely something very important. Purno A Sangma, one of the greatest political leaders of national stature that the Northeast had ever produced in the past 75 years, was a candidate for the presidential elections in 2012. Though he had lost the election to Pranab Mukherjee, the former Lok Sabha Speaker had very accurately predicted that the day was not far when a tribal person would occupy Rashtrapati Bhawan. Had Sangma won, he would have created two records, of being a tribal as well as a Christian making it to Raisina Hills. The journey of the 1958-born Draupadi Murmu from an obscure village called Uparbeda in the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha to Raisina Hills is in fact a story worth including in high school textbooks, which in turn will inspire hundreds and thousands of poor, downtrodden people, irrespective of whether tribal or non-tribal, to draw a roadmap for success. While both her grandfather and father were village heads, Draupadi Murmu began her career as a Junior Assistant at the Irrigation Department of the Odisha Government, then turned into a teacher, and finally stepped into public life by getting elected as a councilor of the Rairangpur Nagar Panchayat in 1997 as a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate. Having been elected twice to the Odisha Assembly, she had also served as a minister and became national vice-president of BJP's Scheduled Tribes Morcha. In 2014, she was appointed Governor of Jharkhand, and eight years later she has become India's first citizen. On the personal front, she has had to face a series of tragedies, which included the death of her husband and son. But then, that Draupadi Murmu is a person with a strong will and courage is proved as she continued with public service which won her the highest status of a Republic.