Johar Jharkhand

Johar! The word means salutations in the tribal dialect of Jharkhand, which goes to polls from May 13.

It was 24 years ago that the State of Jharkhand was created, after giving sleepless nights to politicians and residents in its parent State of Bihar. The latter, primarily an agricultural State, saw nearly its entire mineral resources and power plants shifting to the new State. At the time the Bhojpuri singer Anand Mohan faced 22 FIRs for singing “Mishri malai khailu, kaila tan buland, ab khaiah shakarkand, alga bhaile Jharkhand.” (You ate butter and rock candy and your body became strong; now manage with sweet potato as Jharkhand has gone).

The new State was created amid a passionate cry for a separate State for tribals when the indigenous tribal (Santjhal, Ho, Gond) and Mahato population of Jharkhand, then called South Bihar, complained that North Bihar was eating up all its resources but leaving its villages bereft of development. It was hoped that having their own State would improve the lot of the indigenous people.

As the State, which sends 14 Lok Sabha members to Parliament, goes to polls in the weeks to come, one wonders if its dream has been fulfilled or if the State still lags in comparison to Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand, which were carved out of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh respectively, along with Jharkhand, in 2000 by Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government at the Centre.

The creation of new States or the bifurcation of existing ones are often political decisions although they are laced with the promise of better governance, as one finds this time in Mayawati’s promise for a separate State for Western UP (Harit Pradesh). Jharkhand was no exception, as it suited both the BJP and the ruling RJD in Bihar to pitch for separation.

Today, there is a building boom in cities like Ranchi, Dhanbad, and Jamshedpur. The crowd at the famous Shiva temple in Deoghar has only grown with the passage of time. Malaria still strikes villages in Latehar and West Singhbhum districts. Jharkhand is home to 23 listed tribes, including primitive ones like Asur and Birhor (who lived on trees), and is still called a tribal State although the non-tribal population outnumbers the tribal.

The State has seen 12 Chief Ministers since its creation. The only Chief Minister who could complete his full term in Jharkhand was the non-tribal Raghubar Das of the BJP while the tribal leader who is credited for the creation of Jharkhand, Shibu Soren, had to contend with the shortest stint of 10 days as Chief Minister in one of his tenures.

Shibu Soren’s supporters call him “Dishom Guru” and once even believed in his miraculous powers of being present in multiple locations at the same time. His conviction in the 1993 JMM bribery case did not affect his popularity nor his being charged in a murder case. The juiciest part of the JMM bribery case was that Soren had reportedly deposited the bribe money in a Delhi bank. In March, the case came back in the news after the Supreme Court overruled its earlier majority judgement in which it had upheld the immunity of MPs or MLAs in cases of bribes for a speech or a vote in the House. And the issue promises to haunt the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Soren’s party, in the run-up to the polls.

Jharkhand is the only State where an Independent candidate, Madhu Koda, became Chief Minister and continued in office for two years until he was brought down by a corruption case. Corruption is a menace that continues to stalk Jharkhand even today, with money repeatedly playing a role in Rajya Sabha nominations.

On May 6, the ED recovered cash to the tune of Rs 30 crore in raids conducted on some people close to Jharkhand’s Rural Development Minister, Alamgir Alam, with the cash found in the house of a domestic worker of the Minister’s private secretary. Earlier, a sum of Rs 350 crore was recovered from the residence of former Rajya Sabha MP Dheeraj Sahu. In fact, the extent of the problem becomes clear when you consider that three Chief Ministers of Jharkhand have been jailed in corruption cases.

Yet, Jharkhand retains its sense of humour. In the coalfield city of Dhanbad, there is a dhaba called Dukhi (Unhappy) and in nearby Giridih there is an eatery called Bewakoof (Foolish). Both are places where people throng for a full meal that is easy on the pocket. And if you ever visit Hazaribagh, a Lok Sabha constituency represented by former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, don’t miss the luscious dark brown gulab jamuns of Tati Jharia, an otherwise nondescript town.

In fact, you will find a dozen and more shops bearing the name “Pradhanji Gulab Jamun Waale” in the Hazaribagh-Vishnugarh crescent. In this Naxal-hit region, even the Maoist threat has failed to quell the spirit of gulab-jamun entrepreneurship. Today, the venture has travelled to the bigger cities of Jharkhand as well. But sweets are not the only thing that has taken off, with opium cultivation becoming a big thing of late in Bishungarh. About two hours away is the city of Jamtara, where unemployment is so severe that many youngsters have taken to cyber crime en masse, with professional phishing their crime of choice. The menace runs so deep that it inspired a Netflix series titled Jamtara: Sabka Number Ayega.

Some 90 km away is the revered Jain pilgrimage spot, the Sammed Shikharji temple, in the Parasnath hills, which got into an unsavoury controversy last year when the Jains protested against the State government’s decision to declare it a tourist spot. The VHP issued a statement against the move while the Congress leader Kamal Nath wrote to the then Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren to change his decision. Interestingly, Hemant’s predecessor Raghubar Das of the BJP, also faced a similar protest in 2015.

Politically speaking, Lok Sabha election 2024 could well decide the fate of the most popular and prominent political family of Jharkhand, the Sorens, and also set a roadmap for tribal politics in the coming years. The ageing patriarch of the family, Shibu Soren, is a pale shadow of his powerful self and leads an almost retired life. His son and political heir, Hemant Soren, is in jail, arrested just months before the general election, with the party hurriedly electing a new CM from outside the family due to the intense rivalry for the chair among other Soren family members.

An intense albeit muted fight is ongoing in Jharkhand right now, involving the two daughters-in-law of the Soren family. Sita Soren (wife of the late Durga Soren, Shibu Soren’s older son) is fighting from the Lok Sabha seat of Dumka, a family pocket borough, on a BJP ticket. And Kalpana Soren (wife of the jailed Hemant Soren) is hoping to win the Gandey Assembly seat on the JMM ticket, for which the bye-election was held on April 19. The results of both will be declared on June 4. The BJP is saying “Khela Hobe” (There will be the game). Indications are Sita Soren could try to bring back people from her former party, who were close to her late husband.

The Gandey seat was vacated by veteran JMM leader Sarfaraz Ahmed to enable Kalpana Soren to contest. Now, with her political rival Sita having joined the BJP camp, Kalpana could replace Champai Soren as CM if JMM wins the Assembly by-election. Champai is the senior-most JMM leader. An associate of Shibu Soren, Champai is a die-hard family loyalist.

The BJP, which lost the 2019 Assembly polls to the JMM-Congress-RJD alliance is hoping to bounce back to power in the Assembly and also corner a lion’s share of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the State. It has allied with the All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU), whose leader Sudesh Mahato drives hard bargains, and has already been Deputy Chief Minister twice in two rival alliances led by the BJP and the JMM only because of his party’s five MLAs. Fighting the BJP-AJSU combine is the Congress-JMM-RJD-CPI-ML alliance.

There is terrific woman power at play in these polls. The BJP has fielded two other women candidates—Annapurna Devi from Koderma and Gita Koda from Singhbhum. In Singhbhum, the JMM candidate is also a woman, the MLA Joba Majhi. The Congress has fielded two woman candidates, party veteran Subodhkant Sahay’s daughter Yashaswini from Ranchi and Anupama Singh from Dhanbad. And the RJD candidate is Mamta Bhuiyan, who is taking on the BJP’s sitting MP, VD Ram, the former DGP of Jharkhand.

Here’s wishing Johar to the women of Jharkhand!

Write to us with your comments on Poll Vault, and I will see you next week, next State, next rivalry.

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline

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