Hemant Soren Comes of Age

WHEN JHARKHAND Chief Minister Hemant Soren was to attend President Droupadi Murmu’s G20 dinner last year in the capital, an aide recalls, he went to get dressed and came out after a couple of minutes wearing a tribal white and red gamchha, a traditional stole, over his white kurta. Soren said one should never forget one’s roots.

One of the two Opposition chief ministers who attended the dinner, the other being West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee while the rest gave it a miss, Soren had flown to Delhi, skipping summons from the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) to appear before it over alleged money laundering in a land scam case. This was the third time he had ignored summons from the agency, which finally took him into custody in January this year under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), three months before the Lok Sabha elections.

The 49-year-old tribal leader was behind bars at Ranchi’s Birsa Munda Jail when his Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)-led I.N.D.I.A. bloc won all five reserved Scheduled Tribe (ST) Lok Sabha seats. By the time he was released on bail after five months in prison, Soren had a peppered flowing beard, much like his father Shibu Soren, the JMM founder still revered by the state’s tribals. He was no longer a clean-shaven man with a trimmed moustache and neatly cut short hair when he addressed the media, saying that a political conspiracy had been hatched against him. “I will keep fighting for the cause of the people and the tribals,” said Soren. He left his new look un­touched, a reminder of his days in prison, letting his beard and hair grow, as he prepared for the Jharkhand Assembly polls.

He had got two jolts. While he was in jail, his sister-in-law Sita Soren joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) apparently over differences with his wife Kalpana Soren, and soon after he reclaimed his chair following his release, his senior party leader Champai Soren, who was given charge as chief minister, also decided to switch sides. Hemant Soren said he was not aware that “Champai da” was annoyed. A minister in his government earlier, Champai Soren was an associate of Shibu Soren and had played a crucial role in the fight for a separate state of Jharkhand in the 1990s. Neither of these blows dented the prospects of JMM and its allies in the November Assembly elections, with I.N.D.I.A. winning 56 of the 81 seats while BJP got just 21, its worst perfor­mance since the state’s formation in 2000. Soren came back as chief minister, breaking the pattern of an incumbent never re­turning in the state. Of the 43 seats JMM fought, it won 34, four more than in 2019; Congress won 16 of the 30 it fought, retaining its numbers in the Assembly, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) won four, three more than last time, out of six; and the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist), or CPI(ML), two of the three it contested. It was Soren who convinced the Congress and RJD leadership to make space for CPI-ML in the alliance to ensure a united fight against BJP. Meanwhile, BJP, which had pinned its hopes on Champai Soren to reach out to tribals, particularly on his Kolhan turf, won only one—his own Seraikela constitu­ency—of the 28 ST seats in the state.

It was at the time when Champai Soren was in talks with BJP that Hemant Soren began preparing for the Assembly polls. He launched the Mukhyamantri Maiya Samman Yojana, a flagship scheme transferring ₹1,000 a month to women in the age group of 18-50, setting a target of 48 lakh beneficiaries. A Santhali himself, he chose Pakur in the state’s tribal-dominated Santhal Pargana region, to make the announcement. After BJP, in a bid to outflank the ruling alliance, promised ₹2,100 a month to women, the state cabinet approved raising the quantum of the state government’s scheme to ₹2,500 from December, a day before the Election Commission declared the polling dates in October. The Soren government has also introduced other schemes for women like the Savitribai Phule Kishori Samridhi Yojana (SPKSY), provid­ing financial assistance for the education of girls to bring down dropout rates among them. Women voters outnumbered men in the two-phased election in the state, with 70.46 per cent women and 65 per cent men voting. More women voted in the Assembly elections than in the Lok Sabha polls held less than six months ago.

When BJP dedicated its campaign to Bangladeshi infiltration with the slogan ‘Roti, Beti, Maati’, particularly in the Santhal Par­gana region, hoping to gain the confidence of the tribals by saying that the Muslim outsiders were a threat to their bread, daughters and land, Soren took a cautious approach, desisting from getting drawn into that narrative. He, instead, raised the tribals’ Sarna code demand, an emotive issue for the nature-worshipping indig­enous people who want their own religious identity. His govern­ment had passed a resolution for inclusion of the Sarna religious code in the Census and sent it to the Centre. While Soren tried to consolidate the tribal vote bank, he also reached out to all com­munities through universal welfare schemes like Abua Awas Yojana, providing housing to the poor, and a pension scheme, besides the Maiya Samman Yojana and other women-oriented schemes. His strategy paid off.

On the other hand, BJP’s Saath Hain tho Safe Hain (United We Are Safe) slogan, triggering suspicion that it implied bringing tribals under the larger Hindu fold, seems to have deepened the commu­nity’s scepticism about the party which had brought in the state’s first non-tribal chief minister, Raghubar Das, who had proposed amendments to the 1949 Santhal Pargana Tenancy (SPT) Act which bars non-tribals from buying tribal land in the region, and the 1908 Chota Nagpur Tenancy (CNT) Act applying to the Chota Nagpur Plateau, laws seen by the tribals as saviours of their land. The amendments made way for tribal land to be used for development purposes without change in ownership. The changes angered the tribals who launched a pathaalgadi movement, erecting stones in villages marking them as sovereign territory. The amendments were finally left on the back burner but it gave Soren ammunition to take on BJP. Ahead of the Assembly polls in 2019, Soren was con­fident of unseating the Das government. Sitting in his office at his residence in the neighbourhood of the then chief minister, who was equally confident of a second term, an unruffled Soren had spelt out his priorities—the CNT and SNPT Acts, unemployment, and poverty. After BJP’s defeat in 2019, when Soren became chief minister he kept his promise and ordered that all cases registered against those involved in the pathaalgadi movement be withdrawn. Soren was seen as a messiah for the tribals for whom jal, jangal, zameen remains an unwavering battle cry.

Soren has further consolidated his position among the tribals who constitute around 27 per cent of the state’s population, and yet captured seats beyond the tribal belt. According to a senior leader, Soren came out of jail not just with a new look but as a changed man, a transformation likely to have come from “introspection”. The tribals saw his arrest as injustice meted out to a tribal. While Soren retained his Barhait seat, with a higher margin than in 2019 and 2014, his wife Kalpana Soren, who entered the political arena after her husband was arrested, made her electoral debut from Gandey. Together, they had addressed 200 rallies across the state.

ABOUT 15 YEARS after coming into politics, inheriting his father’s political legacy, Hemant Soren has passed several tests—securing the allegiance of the tribals, defying the impression that JMM was just a tribal party, and emerging as a poli­tician in his own right. While Shibu Soren’s political odyssey was dominated by the struggle for a separate state of Jharkhand where tribals would have their own identity, Hemant altered JMM’s course from agitation to governance, reaching out to all communities in the state. Shibu Soren, known as ‘Guruji’, was seen as a Santhal icon but his son broke that ethnic boundary to become a leader of not just all tribals but also of a state with a diverse demography. After I.N.D.I.A.’s victory, he thanked all sections in the state, particu­larly women voters. He also said “abua raj, abua sarkar ka ek itihas Jharkhand mein gadne ja raha hai (Jharkhand is scripting a history of our own government, our own rule).”

A party leader recalls that when he was young, Soren was called ‘Gandhiji’ because of his calm nature. If he got upset, he would go quiet; but he never raised his voice. The teenager, who was fond of riding motorcycles and bicycles and liked photog­raphy, finished school in Patna and enrolled in mechanical en­gineering at BIT Mesra, Ranchi but then dropped out. He came into politics in 2009, the year his elder brother Durga Soren, Sita Soren’s husband, suddenly died. He began as a Rajya Sabha member, but after around six months, represented the Dumka Assembly seat. He went on to become deputy chief minister from 2010 to 2013 and then chief minister for about 17 months when JMM was in alliance with BJP. That alliance fell apart later.

Those who have known him closely say he has changed over the years, becoming more communicative, a better listener, and more astute as a politician. He has been making a plea for gift­ing him books instead of bouquets from those who wish him. “While I was in jail, I got a lot of time to read the books you gifted me. Thank you to everyone for this,” he said on X.

Soren is still known to be soft-spoken and compassionate. At a rally in 2022, when he had asked if any girl was not getting the benefit of SPKSY, a young girl had raised her hand. When she was asked why, she said she was the third girl child and only her two elder sisters were getting the benefit. The scheme was confined to only two daughters in a family. Soren immediately got it altered to reach all girls.

For Hemant Soren, the challenge ahead is to keep the prom­ises he has made to his voters, both financial and political.

Assembly elections 2024Hemant SorenJharkhandnational politcsShibu Sorentribals