When Murmu's meeting with Vajpayee ensured constitutional recognition to Santhali language

President Droupadi Murmu played a pivotal role in convincing then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to include her mother tongue Santhali in the Eighth Schedule in 2003 when she was a minister in the Odisha government, according to a new book.

India’s first tribal president, who turns 65 on Tuesday, went out of her way to plead the case for constitutional recognition to Santhali, Bhubaneswar-based journalist Sandeep Sahu says in his recent book Madam President: The Biography of Droupadi Murmu.

Murmu did it all -- be it talking to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik numerous times or getting a resolution seeking the inclusion of Santhali language in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution passed at a meeting of the Tribal Advisory Council meeting.

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However, what clinched the deal for Murmu, minister in Odisha's BJD-BJP coalition government from 2000 to 2004, was her meeting with Vajpayee, says the book.

Murmu, now the 15th president of India, felt the matter needed attention at the highest level of the Union government and approached M Kharavela Swain -- the three-time BJP MP from Balasore constituency -- to facilitate a meeting with Vajpayee.

Accompanied by Swain and her private secretary Bijay Nayak, she met Vajpayee and presented him a book titled Santhali: The Base of World Languages by Parimal Chandra Mitra.

"Thanks to Kharavela Bhai, we got an appointment with the PM in just 10 minutes. . . Vajpayee ji flipped through the book and muttered, 'Aacha (Good).' He was very impressed when I told him that unlike most Indian languages, Santhali has no 'matras' (vowel diacritic). He assured me that he would ensure its inclusion in the Eighth Schedule," the book quotes Murmu as saying in an interview.

Six months later, Santhali got constitutional recognition with its inclusion in the Eighth Schedule.

In 2003, the 92nd Constitutional Amendment Act added Santhali to Schedule Eighth to the Constitution of India, which lists the official languages of India, along with the Bodo, Dogri and Maithili languages.

According to the 2011 Census of India, over 70 lakh people speak Santhali across Odisha, West Bengal, Tripura, Mizoram, Jharkhand and Bihar, besides parts of Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal.

The Ol Chiki script, developed by tribal scholar Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925, is the official writing system for Santhali.

Later, Murmu also turned her attention to Chandamama, the now defunct but then extremely popular multilingual monthly children's magazine, which was published in Odia as Janha Mamu.

She wrote to the publishers, impressing upon them the need to have a Santhali version of the magazine since the language is spoken by millions of people.

"The publishers accepted her request and Chandamama was duly published in Santhali," the book noted, adding that Murmu was also actively involved in the publication of an eight-page monthly magazine Fagun written in the Santhali language and Ol Chiki script.

Published by Penguin Random House India (PRHI), Madam President: The Biography of Droupadi Murmu claims to unpack the many trials and tribulations, and early years of struggle that elevated the tribal leader to the highest office in the country.