Bidhya Devi Bhandari has become the first female head of state of Nepal. She is also the second President of the federal democratic republic of Nepal.
Bhandari was elected to the top post through the election held at the Legislature-Parliament on Wednesday. She secured a majority 327 votes of the total 549 votes cast through secret ballot. Her contender Kul Bahadur Gurung of Nepali Congress secured 214 votes. 8 votes were declared nullified.
Speaker Onsari Ghartimagar announced Bhandari’s election to the post at the meeting of Legislature-Parliament convened at 5 pm.
She was nominated as the presidential candidate by her party CPN (UML).
With Bhandari’s election, for the first time in history, Nepal has females as the Speaker of the parliament and head of state. Onsari Ghartimagar was elected as Nepal’s first female Speaker about two weeks ago.
Bidhya Bhandari’s biography
Bidhya Bhandari was born Bidhya Pandey to Ram Bahadur Pandey and Mithila Pandey in Ambote village, Bhojpur in 1961.
Widow of charismatic communist leader Madan Bhandari, she was born to a prominent local political family. So she was brought up in an environment that was rife with political happenings. Her father was a headmaster at a local high school, and her grandfather Tilak Bahadur Pandey a social worker and a Pradhan Pancha, a post akin to village head in during the Panchayat regime. Taking up politics, therefore, became natural for Bhandari. She was active in politics since her school days, and became an active cadre of the Nepal Communist Party (Marxist Leninist) after its establishment in 1978. It was during this period that she met Madan Bhandari. The two got married in 1981.
It was after her husband’s untimely and mysterious death in jeep accident in 1993 that she came to political limelight. Less than a year later, she was elected a member of parliament during general elections in 1994 when she defeated former PM and NC leader Krishna Prasad Bhattarai in a constituency in Kathmandu. In 1999 elections, she defeated another prominent NC leader and former Speaker of parliament Damannath Dhungana. Bhandari, however, lost the first Constituent Assembly (CA) polls held in 2008. She became the CA member in the second CA under proportional system.
Bhandari was elected party’s vice-chairperson in the eighth general convention in 2009 and remained in the post in the ninth assembly in 2014.
She was nominated as the presidential candidate by her party CPN (UML) and supported by around dozen other parties including coalition partners UCPN (Maoist) and Rastriya Prajatantra Party (Nepal).
Photo: Reuters
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