Record · Legacy
Reading a presidency that is not yet finished
An assessment written with the caution the subject demands. What follows separates what is already a matter of record from what is interpretation, and says which is which.
A caution
Legacy is a historian’s word
It is not possible to write the legacy of a presidency from inside it. Assessments made while a Head of State is in office are, almost without exception, revised later. This page therefore does two things and refuses a third: it sets out what is already on the record, it offers analysis clearly labelled as analysis, and it does not predict.
I — Matters of record
What will be in the reference books regardless
Four facts about this presidency require no interpretation. They will appear in every future account of the office.
01
The first President from a Scheduled Tribe
No person from a Scheduled Tribe had previously held the office of President of India in the seventy-two years between the first President taking office in 1950 and July 2022.
02
The second woman to hold the office
Smt. Pratibha Patil held the office from 2007 to 2012. Droupadi Murmu is the second woman to be elected President of India.
03
The first President born after independence
Born in June 1958, she is the first Head of State of the Republic whose entire life has been lived under the Constitution of India.
04
A complete progression of elected office
Ward councillor, twice a state legislator, twice a minister with independent charge, Governor of a state for six years, and Head of State. Very few Presidents of India have held every rung of that ladder.
II — Analysis
Representation, and what the Constitution promised
The Constitution of India did something unusual in 1950: it wrote representation into the design of the state rather than leaving it to politics. Articles 330 and 332 reserve seats in the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Article 335 requires their claims to be taken into consideration in appointments to services. The Fifth and Sixth Schedules create distinct administrative regimes for Scheduled Areas and for tribal areas in the North East.
The debate about those provisions has run continuously since. It is a debate about whether structural reservation produces genuine representation or a managed version of it — whether the ladder actually leads anywhere.
The career of Droupadi Murmu is a data point in that argument, and it is worth stating precisely what kind. She entered public life through a seat reserved for women on a municipal council in 1997, five years after the Seventy-Third and Seventy-Fourth Amendments created such seats. She was then twice elected to the Odisha Legislative Assembly from Rairangpur, a constituency reserved for the Scheduled Tribes; held executive office; was appointed to a constitutional office in a state where she had no political base; and was finally elected Head of State by an electoral college in which nothing at all is reserved. The route was used, end to end, by one person within a single career.
That does not settle the wider argument. One career does not establish that a system works at scale, and the underlying indicators — literacy, land tenure, displacement, representation in the higher civil services — remain the proper measure of whether it does. But it does establish that the route exists and is passable, which is not a trivial finding about a constitutional design.
III — Historical context
Adivasi India and the long argument about land
To understand why the election of an Adivasi President registered as it did, it is necessary to know the sequence it belongs to. It is a sequence about land, and it is nearly two centuries long.
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1855
The Santal Hool
The Santal rebellion against moneylenders, landlords and the East India Company’s revenue administration — among the largest peasant risings of nineteenth-century India, and the reason the Santal Parganas were later given a distinct legal regime.
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1899 – 1900
The Ulgulan of Birsa Munda
The Munda rising in the Chotanagpur plateau against the erosion of customary land rights. It ended in defeat and in Birsa Munda’s death in custody, but it produced legislation.
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1908 and 1949
The Tenancy Acts
The Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908 and the Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act, 1949 restrict the transfer of Adivasi land to people outside the community. They remain the central statutes of the region — and they are the Acts whose amendment Governor Murmu returned to the Jharkhand legislature in 2017.
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1950
The Fifth and Sixth Schedules
The Constitution creates separate administrative arrangements for Scheduled Areas and tribal areas, including Tribes Advisory Councils and a special role for the Governor in the administration of those areas.
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1996
PESA
The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act extends elected local self-government to Scheduled Areas, and gives the Gram Sabha a defined role in land acquisition and resource decisions.
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2003
Santali in the Eighth Schedule
The Ninety-Second Amendment adds Santali to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution — formal recognition of the language of her own community.
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2006
The Forest Rights Act
The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act recognises individual and community rights over forest land, describing them in its preamble as rights that had gone unrecorded — a ‘historical injustice’.
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2022
An Adivasi Head of State
Droupadi Murmu takes office as President of India. The office holds no power over land policy. What it holds is standing — and in a sequence that has run since 1855, standing is not nothing.
IV — Analysis
Women in Indian public leadership
India has had a woman Prime Minister, two women Presidents, women Chief Ministers in a dozen states, a woman Finance Minister and a woman Speaker of the Lok Sabha. It has also had, for most of its parliamentary history, a Lok Sabha in which women held well under a fifth of the seats.
Both statements are true, and the tension between them is the substance of the subject. Individual women have reached the highest offices; the aggregate representation of women in Indian legislatures has lagged far behind that.
The reservation of a third of the seats in the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies for women — enacted as the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — is the current attempt to close that gap, and President Murmu has referred to it in her addresses to the nation. The argument for it is the same argument that produced the reservation under which she was first elected to a municipal council in 1997.
V — Analysis
Institutional continuity
There is a second, quieter way to assess a presidency, and it is the way constitutional historians usually apply: did the office function as the Constitution intends?
On that measure the record so far is one of continuity. Governments have been appointed and sworn in; Chief Justices, a Vice-President, a Comptroller and Auditor General and Central Vigilance Commissioners have taken office by presidential warrant; Bills have received assent; Parliament has been summoned and addressed under Article 87 in each of the required sessions; envoys have been received; the Republic has been represented abroad.
None of that is remarkable, and that is exactly the point. The Indian presidency is designed so that its ordinary operation is invisible and its exceptional operation is rare. A presidency that produces no constitutional crisis has, by the standard the framers set, done its work.
The single most substantive discretionary act of her constitutional career remains the 2017 return of the Tenancy Act amendments in Jharkhand — taken under Article 200, in the office of Governor, and consistent with what that power exists for.
In closing
What can honestly be said now
That a woman from a Santal village in Mayurbhanj, who was the first girl from that village to finish college, who spent four years as a clerk and three as an unpaid teacher, and who began her public career on a municipal ward, became the constitutional Head of the Indian Republic — and reached it through the ordinary institutions of Indian democracy rather than around them.
Everything beyond that is for historians with more distance than this page has. What the record shows is not an exception to the Indian system but a demonstration of one of the things it was designed to make possible. Whether it becomes a pattern rather than a landmark is a question the next several decades will answer, and it will be answered by aggregate figures rather than by any single career.
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