July 25, 1997
K.R. Narayanan was sworn in as President of India–the first from an “untouchable” caste. In his inaugural, after receiving 95 percent of the votes in the electoral college, he said, “That the nation has found a consensus for its highest office in someone who has sprung from the grass-roots of our society and grown up in the dust and heat of this sacred land is symbolic of the fact that the concerns of the common man have now moved to the centre stage of our social and political life.”
