By IANS
New Delhi : India Saturday made history by choosing a woman as head of state for the first time as ruling coalition candidate Pratibha Patil won the presidential election as expected by a comfortable margin.
Immediately after the results were announced, she was congratulated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi and declared that her win was "victory of principles" and a "victory of right thinking".
Patil, 72, will be the 13th president of the country and will enter the 340-room Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Edwin Lutyens-designed red sandstone presidential mansion, on July 25.
Patil succeeds the highly popular technocrat president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam who, by his easy mixing ways, became a darling of the middle class and student community and succeeded in making the somewhat forbidding and inaccessible presidential palace into what he called a "people's bhavan".
Patil, a lifelong Congress worker whose last job was that of governor of Rajasthan state, won by 306,810 votes against her rival Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who contested the July 19 presidential election as an independent candidate backed by the opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Immediately after Returning Officer P.D.T. Achary announced her victory, Congress party workers, who were in a jubilant mood since morning, broke out in open celebrations – bursting firecrackers, beating drums and distributing sweets outside her temporary residence in the capital.
A visibly elated Patil, clad in red-bordered yellow silk sari with her head covered in traditional style, came out flanked by Congress leaders and said: "It is a victory of principles that the people of this country have upheld."
While Gandhi thanked all her UPA constituents, the Left and especially Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati for supporting Patil, Manmohan Singh said it was a "vote against the politics of divisiveness and in favour of unity and the strong foundation of our secular credentials."
Gandhi, who first spoke in Hindi and then in English, also said: "It is a special moment for us women – as also for men – that a woman has become the president first time after independence."
Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee also congratulated her, while Shekhawat, who fared badly in the election, stepped down from the post of vice president saying that he accepted the defeat with "humility".
Patil, former Rajasthan governor, got 325,180 votes from the state legislators and 442 of the total 682 MPs who cast their votes, paving her way to Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the president.
An MP's vote value is 706 and an MLA's varies from state to state according to its population.
Patil, who had been haunted by unsubstantiated opposition charges of corruption, fraud and improprieties, has won almost 11,000 more votes than expected. Thursday's poll had been preceded by the most acerbic campaign, which many political analysts said had dented the prestige of the country's highest office.
Shekhawat got 331,306 votes. But he was out on a duck in four states – Kerala, West Bengal, Tripura and Mizoram.
Patil's native Jalgaon village in Maharashtra and her husband Devisingh Ransingh Shekhawat's native place in Rajasthan's Sikar have been in celebration mood since morning as her victory was a foregone conclusion against her 84-year-old rival, Shekhawat, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) veteran.
Counting began 11 a.m. Saturday with Election Commission officials unsealing ballot boxes that arrived from 30 assemblies and the parliament house.
Patil scored 65.82 percent of the valid votes, Achary said at the end of the counting that lasted for over six hours.
It was a sweep for Patil in her home state Maharashtra, where she won the support of 223 MLAs leaving 58 for Shekhawat.
It was a similar story in Haryana with her getting 74 to Shekhawat's 6, Himachal Pradesh (47-20), Manipur (55-5), Meghalaya (49-6), Andhra Pradesh (223-2), Arunachal Pradesh (58-1), Assam (92-20), Jharkhand (49-28), Delhi (50-19), Goa (25-14), Nagaland (40-12), Sikkim (31-1) and Tamil Nadu (171-59).
In Uttar Pradesh, where the main opposition Samajwadi Party abstained from voting, Patil won 251 against her rival's 52.
In Karnataka it was a close fight as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s ruling ally Janata Dal-Secular abstained from voting. The UPA candidate got 83 and her rival, 82.
Shekhawat got more votes in eight NDA-ruled states. In Bihar he got 145 to Patil's 89, in Chhattisgarh (51-37), Gujarat (123-57), Madhya Pradesh (163-56), Punjab (66-45), Orissa (100-46), Uttarakhand (41-27) and Rajasthan (134-63). The vice president belongs to Rajasthan.