All the president’s mien matters. On June 30, the ancient city of Gorakhpur did not merely host the ceremonial arrival of India’s President, but it bore witness to a deeper continuity. Beneath monsoon-laden skies, President Droupadi Murmu stepped into the sanctum of the Gorakhpur temple—the beating heart of the math presided over by Yogi Adityanath — not just for prayer, but to represent political will.
Her visit was not a routine gesture of the State, but a ritual of affirmation—of faith, of governance, and of the quiet revolution underway in India’s moral geography. Murmu’s presidency—like that of Rajendra Prasad walking barefoot into shrines post-independence, or APJ Abdul Kalam igniting young minds in forgotten towns—marks a rare alignment of constitutional stature and popular symbolism. The President’s travels do not merely decorate the calendar. Instead, they re-map India’s emotional and political terrain, bringing the margins into the nation’s beating heart.
But hers is a presidency unlike few others’. In less than three years in office, she has spent 203 days travelling across the country. She has undertaken 110 trips, including 11 to her home state Odisha, and on other occasions to 34 other states and Union Territories—a record for any President. This is not ceremonial restlessness. It is a deliberate redrawing of the moral map of the republic, where forgotten towns, remote tribal regions, and small universities matter just as much as capital cities and international forums.
To appreciate the significance of Murmu’s presidency, one must place it in the long shadow of her predecessors’. There have been presidents who inspired widely through intellect—Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who held forth on the Bhagavad Gita at Oxford, and Zakir Husain, who championed Hindustani culture and basic education. Others, like K R Narayanan, stood as constitutional purists, refusing to toe the line when India flirted with instability.
Even Kalam’s travels, significant as they were, did not encompass the range or symbolism of Murmu’s journeys. Where Kalam represented aspiration, Murmu embodies dignity reclaimed. Where Kalam reached towards the future, Murmu grounds herself in the soil of forgotten pasts: tribal pasts, feminine pasts, marginal pasts that the national narrative has too often edited out. From Karnataka to the Northeast, from Tamil Nadu to Telangana, from Kerala’s convocation halls to the salt-swept coasts of Andhra Pradesh, her visits are not mere protocol; she undertakes pilgrimages of presence.
In Odisha, her home state, she has laid railways’ foundations in tribal belts, inaugurated statues, temples, and hostels. In Chennai, she opened a women’s university, drawing a straight line from her journey from a Santhal village in Mayurbhanj to the presidency and the dreams of young women still fighting for space. Each visit is a brushstroke. Together, they paint a republic that sees, hears, and includes.
Make no mistake, there is a political message here. Her presidency is aligned—sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly—with the BJP’s political vision of cultural assertion, grassroots integration, and regional consolidation. In this, she is both symbol and force: an emblem of the BJP’s cultural-nationalist outreach, yes; but also a subtle reminder that the republic’s soul is shaped by inclusion, not exclusion.
She extends the Rashtrapati’s gaze beyond Delhi’s Lutyens’ lawns to the tea gardens of Assam, tribal hamlets of Odisha and university halls of Bareilly, rendering her presidency a moving shrine of constitutional morality. Murmu’s travels echo Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempt to build a narrative of inclusive Hindutva, where tribal heritage, women’s empowerment, and infrastructural progress all find a place within the saffron canvas.
But to reduce Murmu to a mascot of the BJP would be to miss the deeper current she is channelling. Her presidency reclaims the spiritual purpose of the republic—not in theological terms, but in civilisational tropes. She carries the Vedic chant and the graduation scroll with equal conviction. She sits among elephants during the Mysuru Dasara and listens to Rabindra Sangeet in Kolkata with the same grace. Hers is a presidency that neither denies India’s diversity nor flattens it into abstraction.
Where some presidents sought prestige abroad, Murmu seeks meaning at home. Where others curated distance, she cultivates familiarity. Her travelogue is not only extensive, but is existential too. It answers a fundamental question: who belongs to India? And her answer, delivered not in declarations but in deeds, is clear: everyone does.
Constitutions, Babasaheb Ambedkar warned, are only as good as the people who are in charge of protecting it. In Murmu’s presidency, the Indian Constitution finds a quiet revival not in legal argument, but in lived ethic. When Murmu moves among plantation workers in Assam or tribal children in Mizoram, she is not performing sympathy; she is restoring parity.
This is especially crucial in a time when the State’s embrace often seems more punitive than paternal. As institutions centralise and dissent narrows, Murmu’s message is softly radical: inclusion by example. Unlike the activist President Narayanan—who questioned the government from within—Murmu reforms the presidency by expanding its emotional radius. She does not confront; she consecrates. She does not thunder; she testifies. In that sense, she is both constitutional and mythic—a figure who reasserts the moral imagination of the state without wielding its coercive powers.
Droupadi Murmu has made the presidency mobile, modest, and meaningful. She does not just visit districts; she blesses aspirations. She does not merely cut ribbons; she sows futures. Her presidency is not one of flamboyance, but also of pilgrimage to temples and hospitals, universities and bridges, tea gardens and tribal hills.
President Murmu still has three more years to go on Raisina Hill, but her legacy is already being etched—not in marble busts or state portraits, but in rail tracks laid across tribal land, in convocation medals handed to first-generation graduates, in the laughter of children who, for once, see someone like them at the helm. And perhaps that is the point. The presidency, at its best, is not about power. It is about presence.
Murmu’s is not just a political presence, but a philosophical one reminding India of what it is, and what it must continue to be: not merely a territory, but a moral idea in motive. If the Rashtrapati Bhavan was once a cloistered echo of colonial grandeur, it now travels in tribal shawls, in convoys through forgotten districts, speaking the language of aspiration, equity, and rooted pride.
For a long time, the Rashtrapati Bhavan was seen as a colonial triumph that yielded to the spirit of independence: an imperial palace now draped in Gandhian modesty. It hosted banquets, the signing of bills, and dignitaries who waved at parades. In Droupadi Murmu, India does not just see a President. It sees itself.
Read all columns by Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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