By IANS
New Delhi : Kicking off her presidential campaign in right earnest, ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) candidate Pratibha Patil Saturday met top leaders of the coalition, even as efforts were underway to get other parties to support her for the July 19 polls.
As part of this exercise, Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh, accompanied by veteran Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet, called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who also spoke on the telephone with Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray.
Patil arrived here Saturday to a grand welcome as hundreds of people mobbed the Delhi airport to catch a glimpse of India's prospective woman president. Patil, the Rajasthan governor, said her candidature was a big step for women and would help in their empowerment.
Driving straight to Congress president Sonia Gandhi's residence, Patil was closeted with her for 20 minutes. She later met the prime minister and other leaders of the UPA and the Left parties.
Announcing that she would resign as Rajasthan governor before plunging headlong to canvas for votes, Patil declared that she would offer homage at Mahatma Gandhi's memorial before filing her nomination papers.
The Election Commission Saturday issued a notification for the July 19 election.
Patil said she would also call on Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who is widely tipped to be Patil's challenger and who would be backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Though details of Manmohan Singh's meetings were not revealed, it was reliably learnt that he had impressed on Amar Singh the need to back Patil.
The Samajwadi Party is part of a grouping of eight-regional parties called the Third Front and accounts for 105,000 of the over one million votes in the electoral college for the presidential election.
The UPA and the Left have 513,000 votes while the NDA has 354,000 votes in the electoral college.
Highly placed sources told IANS that the prime minister was also likely to speak to Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) president H.D. Deve Gowda to secure his party's support for Patil.
Some days ago, Gowda, who is currently in Bangalore, had said that despite sharing power with the BJP in Karnataka, his party was not bound to support its candidate for the next president.
This was reiterated by party spokesperson Kunwar Danish Ali.
"My leader is away in Bangalore but I know my party has not taken a decision on any candidate so far. I can clearly say that we are not committed to vote for Shekhawat," said Ali.
An indication that a contest for the presidential election seemed certain came from BJP spokesperson Sushma Swaraj, who maintained the party's resolve to back Shekhawat in spite of the prime minister's appeal to the NDA to support Patil.
"There is no question of a consensus candidate," declared Swaraj at a press conference here.
Even so, Patil's election seems almost a certainty and the only question is the margin with which she secures her victory – with the numbers clearly stacked in her favour.