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| Presidential poll ends, cracks in Third Front, NDA | | |
NEW DELHI, JULY 19
Voting in the murkiest ever presidential poll concluded today with UPA-Left nominee Pratibha Patil set to emerge the country's first woman President amid cracks in the NDA and the nascent Third Front.
The election to choose the successor to A P J Abdul Kalam saw a bitter tussle between Patil, fielded by the UPA-Left combine with support from the BSP and some other parties, and Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, an independent backed by the BJP-led NDA.
Despite the poll being a one-sided affair, MPs and MLAs voted in large numbers. A total of 682 of 770 MPs exercised their franchise, marking a turnout of 88.5 per cent, while 91 per cent of MLAs made it to polling booths. As many as 3,755 MLAs out of 4,170 voted, with seven states recording 100 per cent polling.
It was trouble for Shekhawat right from the word go as the Shiv Sena, the BJP's oldest ideological ally, broke ranks to support Patil as she is a Maharashtrian. The Trinamool Congress, another key NDA constituent, chose to abstain.
The woes of Shekhawat increased with dissident BJP MLAs in Gujarat voting for Patil to show their unhappiness with Chief Minister Narendra Modi's style of functioning.
The fledgling UNPA, also known as the Third Front, had declared it would abstain to maintain equi-distance from the UPA and NDA, but saw constituents AIADMK and MDMK making a u-turn on the grouping's decision.
Dissidents in the INLD in Rajasthan, Samajwadi Party in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh and TDP in Andhra Pradesh -- all part of the Third Front -- also went against the grouping's decision to abstain.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister P R Dasmunsi said after the end of polling that five AIADMK MPs and three from the Samajwadi Party -- Munawar Hussain and suspended members Raj Babbar and Beni Prasad Verma -- had voted.
Atiq Ahmed, another Samajwadi Party MP, said he had voted and attacked the party's leadership for deciding to abstain.
Two MDMK MPs, Ravi Chandran and C Krishnan, and TRS member A Narendra, who parted company with party chief Chandrasekhara Rao, also voted.
Dasmunsi, who recently claimed Patil would win by over three lakh votes, today said the UPA-Left nominee would secure a "massive" victory but steered away from specific numbers.
Former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who is the chairman of the NDA, played down the division in the opposition alliance and expressed hope it would unite again.
Shekhawat's spokesperson Sushma Swaraj claimed he had secured support from even outside the NDA.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi were among the first to cast their votes. The UPA has been claiming that Patil will romp home with nearly six lakh votes of the total of over 10.98 lakh votes in the electoral college.
Dasmunsi took a dig at AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa for the u-turn by her party, saying that such a change of mind overnight was an art. He wondered as to what sort of a general Jayalalithaa was as he remarked that her action was akin to that of telling one's supporters to go to the "battleground and I will sit at home".
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