The stage has been set for India’s first woman President. If this is history in the making, its circumstances weren’t exactly the stuff history is made of.

For, the announcement of Pratibha Patil, the 71-year-old Governor of Rajasthan and a Congress loyalist, as the UPA-Left combine’s candidate for President, was more accident than design.

That’s why there were conflicting reports on whose idea this was. “We had reached a logjam and we had to get out of it. It was at this point that we said that the Congress should propose a woman’s name for the President’s post,” CPI(M) Politburo member and MP Sitaram Yechury told The Indian Express.

Officials in the government, however, said it was the PM himself who had prepared a list of not one, but 10 women, for the job.

DMK leader M Karunanidhi had another take. “This is the beginning of 33 per cent reservation for women,” he said. Asked whether it was his idea to field a woman, he said: “It was a marvellous idea that came up in everybody’s mind.”

One thing, however, was clear. The “marvellous idea” emerged only after the Left parties refused to relent on their opposition to Home Minister Shivraj Patil’s candidature forcing Congress president Sonia Gandhi to change her list of nominees. With two years to go for the general elections and Mayawati on her side, the Congress president couldn’t afford any “visible” confrontation with the Left.

This morning, Karunanidhi, who acted as an interlocutor between the UPA and the Left, discussed all probable candidates with Left leaders. The five names, Shivraj Patil, Dr Karan Singh, Sushilkumar Shinde, Motilal Vora and Arjun Singh, which had been floated by the Congress leadership last week were all discussed in the meeting. The Left was not ready to endorse any of these.

... contd.