NEW DELHI, July 17: Kocheri Raman Narayanan was today elected the eleventh President of India. Narayanan, 76, defeated his sole rival, former Chief Election Commissioner TN Seshan with an impressive margin of 3,991 votes of the 4,642 votes polled, by the electoral college of MPs and legislative assembly members.

The Vice President polled the highest ever percentage value of votes in Presidential elections held so far, getting 94.97 percent value of votes.Seshan, who polled 240 votes, lost his deposit. He managed to secure a percentage value of 5.03 percent votes, but his vote value of 50,631 fell far short of the minimum 83,910 required to save his Rs 15,000 deposit.

With almost all the major national and regional political parties pledging their support for Narayanan, his election to the highest office in the country was a foregone conclusion. The only curiosity was on the question of how many voters Seshan would manage to sway. At the end of the day it was evident that he could bag only Shiv Sena and the odd vote in some states like UP, Gujarat and Karnataka.

Narayanan, the diplomat-turned-politician, earned the support of 4,231 voters from the 4,848-strong electoral college comprising of 543 Lok Sabha members, 233 Rajya Sabha and 4,072 state assembly members.

Since morning, Room 63 in Parliament House was a hive of activity as teams of Lok Sabha secretariat staff began unsealing ballot boxes and counting the votes from different states. Six hours later when the counting was over, Lok Sabha Secretary General S Gopalan declared Narayanan's elevation to the office of the President. Soon after, it was all bouquets for Narayanan. His Maulana Azad road residence was beseiged by television and photo journalists. A huge bouquet of flowers from President Shanker Dayal Sharma was delivered by his secretary.

Former Prime Ministers P V Narasimha Rao and Chandrashekar, BJP President L K Advani and Congress President Sitaram Kesri all called on Narayanan.

``I am grateful to the people for electing me to the highest office of the country. I feet very humble,'' Narayanan told journalists.

Pledging to do his best to serve the people, he said he was looking forward to assuming the five year term. Questioned about his role in the current political scenario, Narayanan admitted that it would be difficult. ``But I am confident that the people, Parliament and legislators have full confidence in me,'' he said.

Seshan, when contacted, offered his congratulations to Narayanan, but said nothing more.

Narayanan had a good showing in most of the states, picking up a large number of votes in the big states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, UP and West Bengal. From the 702 valid votes polled in Parliament House, Narayanan gathered 676 votes.

As expected the largest chunk of Seshan's votes were from Maharashtra, where he got 96 votes from his Shiv Sena supporters. But here too, Narayanan had the advantage getting 173 votes.

One surprising fact was that Seshan failed to get a single vote from his home state of Kerala. He managed to get 9 votes in Andhra, 8 in Bihar, 11 in Gujarat, 13 in Karnataka, a surprising 10 votes out of 57 in Meghalaya, 24 in UP and 26 from Parliament House.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.