Snubbed over Bhagwat, Shiv Se suggests Swamithan for President

Mumbai, June 16: Virtually snubbed by the ruling tiol Democratic Alliance (NDA) over its candidate Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat for the post of President, the Shiv Se on Friday threw up the me of agro-scientist M.S. Swamithan for the top job. In the same breath, Se President Uddhav Thackeray also said that if the Bharatiya Jata Party (BJP) President has a good candidate, his party (Se) would give it a thought. He expressed the party’s desire to have a “consensus candidate”, who would be elected without a contest. “If we want to make India a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, then Bhagwat is our first choice, first preference. But if anybody has objections to him, then Swamithan should be made the President,” Thackeray told media persons.
However, he added that “we are also known as a ‘Krishi pradhan desh’ and hence it is appropriate that we have a person like Swamithan” as President. Earlier, party MP Sanjay Raut demanded that Swamithan’s me be considered for President if the BJP was not ready for nomiting Bhagwat.
The Se statements came barely 48 hours before a Shah-Thackeray “summit” scheduled for Sunday morning to solicit and secure its support for an NDA candidate for the Rashtrapati Bhavan. In fact, on at least two previous occasions, the Se had jolted the NDA by supporting Congress nominees — former President Pratibha Patil in 2009 and later current President Prab Mukherjee in 2012.
Swamithan, 91, decorated with Padma Shree (1967), Padma Bhushan (1972) and Padma Vibhushan (1989), is acknowledged globally as “The Father of Green Revolution” of the 1960s, which catapulted the world’s second-most populated country to self-sufficiency in food. Currently, he is Emeritus Chairman of the M.S. Swamithan Research Foundation, based in Cheni, which he founded in 1987.
Swamithan was ranked by Time magazine among 20 Most Influential Asians of the 20th century, along with Mahatma Gandhi and Nobel laureate Rabindrath Tagore. In 2014, he was made Chairman of the tiol Commission on Farmers, which submitted its report with recommendations on the agrarian crises in the farmlands across the country. (IANS)