Ear to the Ground

WHEN FORMER Jharkhand Chief Minister Champai Soren said his trip to Delhi in the middle of August was personal—meeting his grandchildren and getting his broken glasses repaired—he left the media to read the rest between the lines. It was with a broken heart that the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader had landed in the national capital, posting on X that he had three options before him—retire, start a new party, or join another party. Less than a fortnight later, he chose the last and most speculated option—joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Ranchi, saying he was humiliated and insulted in JMM, a party of which he was one of the founding members in the early 1970s, and where he came to be called Kolhan’s “tiger” for his role in the movement for a separate tribal state.

With Champai Soren, a Santhali tribal leader like Chief Minister Hemant Soren, on board, BJP is hoping to make a dent in JMM’s vote bank, as the state heads for Assembly elections later this year. When the JMM-led alliance won the 2019 Assembly polls, BJP had lost all 14 seats in the tribal-dominated Kolhan re­gion, comprising East Singhbhum, West Singhbhum and Sarai­kela Kharsawan, including that of its non-tribal Chief Minister Raghubar Das in Jamshedpur East. The party is now banking on Champai Soren, who has won Kolhan’s Saraikela Assembly seat seven times—thrice in the undivided Bihar Assembly and four times after the formation of Jharkhand in 2000, to capture the tribal vote in the region and beyond it for the party. The last time BJP won the Saraikela seat was in 1980. Of the 28 Scheduled Tribe (ST) seats in the 81-member Assembly, BJP won just two, with the tribals, for whom former Chief Minister Shibu Soren is still the tallest figure, backing the JMM-led alliance. Further hit by defeat in all five reserved ST seats in the state in the Lok Sabha polls this year, at a time when JMM leader Hemant Soren was in jail on charges of money laundering, BJP is leaving no stone unturned to reach out to the tribals, constituting 26.2 per cent of the state’s population as per Census 2011.

For BJP, Champai Soren is the quintessential face—a consum­mate son of the soil, seen as a ‘victim’ of dynastic politics and from a humble background—in its tribal outreach plans. The national party is also hoping that with him on its side, it will mitigate the trust deficit of tribals towards the party, which was seen to have gone against tribal interest when the Raghubar Das government in 2016 tried to amend the 1908 Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (CNT), which bars non-tribals from buying tribal land on the Chotan­agpur Plateau and the 1949 Santhal Pargana Tenancy (SPT) Act, applicable to the Santhal Pargana division. The proposed amendments allowed tribal land to be used for development pur­poses without change in ownership, triggering protests from tribals. President Droupadi Murmu, who was then the state’s governor and incidentally a Santhali tribal herself from neigh­bouring Odisha, had returned the Bill asking how it would help the masses. Just months before the elections in 2019, Das recom­mended to the Centre a separate religious code for Sarnas, an emo­tive issue among the indigenous people of Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Assam, who practise Sarnaism, which revolves around nature worship. This last-minute effort, however, failed to appease the tribals. BJP lost the election, facing a complete rout in tribal-dominated Santhal Pargana and Kolhan, where it won just four of the 32 Assembly segments.

Champai Soren has been at the forefront of the Sarna code de­mand, a fight for tribal identity with jal, jangal, zameen at its heart. He promised in June, when he was chief minister, to ensure the Sarnas a separate code, accusing the Narendra Modi government of delaying it. In November 2020, the Hemant Soren government had passed a resolution in the Assembly on creating a separate religious category for Adivasis in the 2021 All India Census, called Sarna Adivasi Dharma Code Bill or Sarna Code. The Centre, how­ever, put off the Census, citing the Covid-19 pandemic. The ruling alliance in the state has been at loggerheads with BJP on the issue of granting the Sarna code, which the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the party’s ideological mentor, is averse to, insisting that all tribals are Hindus. Champai Soren, who now has a new profile on X with BJP flags in the backdrop, has not spoken on the issue since joining the party.

His recent statements, on saving tribal identity from Bangla­deshi infiltration, as he justified his decision to switch to BJP, are more in sync with that of the saffron party. In one of his posts on X, he said if Bangladeshi intruders are not stopped, the existence of “our society in Santhal Pargana will be in danger. In many areas including Pakur, Rajmahal, their number has become more than that of tribals. Apart from politics, we have to make this issue a social movement. Only then the existence of tribals will be saved.” BJP MP from Jharkhand Nishikant Dubey had raised the issue in Lok Sabha during the Budget Session, saying tribal women were getting married to the infiltrators leading to a decrease in tribal population. This is also in line with the assertions of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, BJP’s election co-in-charge for Jharkhand, who has been fiercely raising the issue of Bangladeshi infiltrators. He has said that after Assam and West Bengal, their next target is Jharkhand.

Champai Soren’s entry into BJP may have been grander had he met the party’s expectations of roping in a few MLAs, a move which could have weakened the Hemant Soren govern­ment. Just as the senior leader, who was close to JMM supremo Shibu Soren, resigned, a development bound to cause un­ease within the party, Hemant Soren replaced him with Ramdas Soren, his party’s MLA from Ghatshila in East Singh­bhum, as part of his strategy to retain hold over Kolhan. The chief minister also held meetings with other MLAs from Kolhan— Samir Mohanty, Mangal Kalindi and Sanjeev Sardar— amidst speculation that more legislators were in talks with BJP. The challenge before JMM would be to retain its foothold in the tribal seats which it swept in 2019, as it tries to consolidate the tribal, Scheduled Caste (SC) and Muslim vote banks.

This is not the first time BJP has brought in tribal faces from rival parties. Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, Shibu Soren’s elder daughter-in-law Sita Soren joined BJP and fought from his turf, Dumka, but lost to JMM’s Nalin Soren. Geeta Koda, wife of former Chief Minister Madhu Koda, who was the lone Congress MP from the state in 2019, joined BJP in February. She, however, lost to JMM’s Joba Majhi from the Singhbhum Lok Sabha seat where she had defeated BJP’s state chief Laxman Gilua in 2019. Even BJP’s veteran tribal leader Arjun Munda lost the Khunti Lok Sabha election to Congress’ Kalicharan Munda.

A Santhal from Kolhan, where the Ho tribes are in majority, Champai Soren is thought to have significant clout among trib­als in the region. Political analysts in the state, however, say it is to be seen if he can extend it beyond the region to breach the vote base of JMM, a cadre-based party which has its supporters still looking up to Shibu Soren across the state. It was on July 3, the day he resigned as chief minister, five months after replacing Hemant Soren following his arrest by the Directorate of Enforce­ment (ED), that Champai Soren started looking at options outside JMM. It was a day he had planned to give appointment letters to 1,500-plus-two teachers, but could not as all his programmes were cancelled. Shibu Soren’s long-trusted man, his relations with Soren Sr’s son Hemant soured over the way he was asked to step down after Hemant’s release from jail. “Can there be anything more humiliating in a democracy than someone else cancelling the programmes of a chief minister?” Champai Soren wrote in a post.

In his resignation letter addressed to Shibu Soren, Champai Soren said that with ill health keeping him away from ac­tive politics, there was no platform within the party where he could voice his concerns.“Under your guidance, during the Jharkhand movement and even after that, I have had the opportunity to learn a lot in life. You will always remain my guide,” he wrote.

BJP is banking on the sympathy factor for Champai Soren, who has categorically expressed his “pain” and “blow to his self-respect” over the way he was made to step down from the chief minister’s post. “He was a tribal chief minister outside the Soren dynasty. This just shows how they treat those who are not family. He is good news for BJP,” says BJP’s Pratul Shah Deo. After Champai Soren, Lobin Hembrom, a senior JMM leader and three-time MLA from Borio Assembly seat, joined BJP which now has in its fold four former tribal chief ministers of the state.

“BJP, in its desperation, is poaching tribal leaders. It took Geeta Koda and Sita Soren, but both lost the Lok Sabha elections. The tribals have rejected BJP. Champai Soren has made a complete turn in his think­ing,” says JMM general secretary Sudivya Kumar Sonu, an MLA from Giridih.

According to BJP sources, the party is expecting to win at least 10 of the 28 ST seats. While it targets the tribal vote, it is also counting on anti-incumbency against the JMM-Congress-Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) alliance in the state, which together had won 47 seats in the 2019 Assembly polls. Unlike last time, when BJP went it alone, this time it is again fighting in alliance with Sudesh Mahto’s All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU), eyeing the Kurmi vote, a community estimated to account for about 10 per cent of the state’s population. In the Lok Sabha elections, under a seat-sharing arrangement with BJP, AJSU’s lone candidate Chandra Prakash Choudhary won from Giridih. Of the remaining 13 seats which BJP fought, it won eight. JMM won three of the five seats it fought while Congress won two of the seven where it fielded its candidates. BJP’s vote share fell from 56 per cent to 48 per cent, while its rivals’ share rose from 32 per cent to 37 per cent. But the biggest jolt for BJP was the defeat in ST seats despite its efforts to woo tribals. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself visited tribal activist Birsa Munda’s birthplace at Ulihatu in Khunti, while the party has named his birth anniversary Tribal Pride Day. After the 2019 Assembly election defeat, BJP brought back its tribal leader Babulal Marandi as state party chief. As the battlelines are drawn, BJP, which experimented with a non-tribal chief minister a decade ago, is now recasting its strategy.

About The Author

Amita Shah