Like the first Dalit president K R Narayanan, NDA's presidential nominee Ram Nath Kovind has risen from a modest background but the two dalit leaders took different paths to reach the zenith of their public life.


The election of Kovind, 71, as India's 14th President is a virtual certainty with several non-NDA parties too lending their support to BJP's surprise candidature of the little-known dalit activist and a former lawyer.


While it is the right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party which chose Kovind, Narayanan, a diplomat-turned politician, became vice president in 1992 and the president in 1997 courtesy active support from the Left, which had proposed his name first. Kovind's candidature was announced yesterday.

If Narayanan entered politics from the top-a noted diplomat he was asked by Indira Gandhi to join the Congress and contested his first Lok Sabha election at the age of 64 in 1984- Kovind has risen through the BJP's ranks and held various organisational posts.


The Dalit leader from Kerala won three back-to-back elections and was union minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government. Kovind lost two elections- one Lok Sabha and one assembly- but the BJP ensured his political rise by sending him to the Rajya Sabha in 1994 and then in 2000.

It is said the then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao did not make Narayanan a minister because he was seen as too "Left-leaning" but the Left parties ensured that he became the vice president as a trade-off for their support to Shankar Dayal Sharma's presidential bid in 1992.

As the vice president, he was the natural choice for the president's post in 1997 and all major parties, from the Congress to the BJP, supported him. Shiv Sena, which has now voiced its reservations to Kovind's candidature, had projected T N Seshan as its candidate who lost in an one-sided contest.