How JMM converted crisis into opportunity in Jharkhand

When Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader Hemant Soren took oath for the fourth time as Chief Minister of Jharkhand on November 28, the State re-elected an incumbent government for the first time in the 24 years since it was carved out of Bihar in 2000.

The Hemant Soren-led INDIA coalition won a massive mandate, securing 56 of the 81 seats (JMM: 34, Congress: 16, Rashtriya Janata Dal: 4, and Left parties: 2), and is expected to usher in a period of stable and effective governance in the State. The election also saw a few firsts. For the first time an alliance in Jharkhand won more than 50 seats. The JMM improved on its previous outings to record its best performance. It won 12 seats in 2000, 17 in 2005, 18 in 2009, 19 in 2014, and 30 in 2019.

BJP’s decline

The BJP’s decline in the State since its 2014 victory is the result of multiple factors, including frequent change in leadership, from Arjun Munda (tribal) to Raghubar Das (non-tribal) to Babulal Marandi (tribal). This year, the factors that worked against the BJP were a sympathy wave for Hemant Soren, who was jailed before the Lok Sabha election, the division of Kudmi votes, and the decline of the BJP’s ally, the All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU), following the rise of Jairam Mahato and his Jharkhand Loktantrik Krantikari Morcha (JLKM).

Also, local BJP leaders were not enthusiastic because too much prominence was given to outsiders in the campaigning and strategy. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the BJP’s co-incharge for Jharkhand, virtually became the campaign’s face, sidelining local leaders to the extent that the voters saw the election as a Himanta versus Hemant contest.

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Moreover, the BJP did not project any chief ministerial candidate in order to pre-empt an internal power tussle, unlike the INDIA bloc’s clear projection of Hemant Soren. Some well-known BJP leaders such as Kedar Hazra and Louis Marandi even quit the party to join the JMM ahead of the election in protest against the importance being given to turncoats.

The BJP’s State chief, Babulal Marandi, was no match for Hemant Soren, who captured the imagination of voters along with his father, Shibu Soren, the “dishom guru” (teacher of the nation) of Jharkhand, who still enjoys tremendous popularity among the indigenous people.

Hemant even sported a beard to resemble his father in the run-up to the election, which observers said was an attempt to remind voters of his father and the JMM’s role in the creation of a separate State for tribal people.

Most importantly, perhaps, the BJP’s polarisation pitch was a complete failure. The party tried to create a bogey of Bangladeshi Muslims marrying tribal girls and taking away their land, but civil groups opposed this narrative and repeatedly countered it with data that reflected the ground reality. The numbers showed that the decline in the tribal population was neither alarming nor a new phenomenon; also that there were other factors involved, such as migration of tribal people for jobs outside the State as well as migrants from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar coming into Jharkhand over the years.

Tribal consolidation

With the tribal population consolidating behind the JMM and its alliance, which already had the Muslim vote, the BJP was left with the last resort of polarising voters, which it did with great alacrity. The ploy did not work, and its high-decibel campaign had few takers. Jharkhand is no Assam; tribal people and Muslims have worked and voted together for decades in most regions.

The JMM also added to its tribal, Muslim, and Christian supporters a significant number of women voters through the Maiya Samman Yojana scheme, which provides financial aid of Rs.1,000 a month to women between 18 and 50. The party has promised to hike this amount to Rs.2,500. The BJP promised a similar scheme called Gogo Didi Yojana, but it did not click with the voters since the JMM’s scheme successfully transferred the cash to beneficiaries’ accounts days ahead of the election (which led to a political row).

What also worked in the JMM’s favour was the waiver of outstanding electricity bills and the introduction of a scheme providing free electricity up to 200 units, similar to what the Aam Aadmi Party government has been doing in Delhi.

The BJP had hoped to exploit Hemant Soren’s arrest by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) (in a money-laundering case in January) to reverse its Lok Sabha debacle, where it had lost all the tribal seats. However, the JMM successfully turned it into an emotive issue and created a wave of sympathy among tribal voters.

Sympathy for Soren

The Ranchi-based social activist Sudhir Pal said that Hemant Soren’s arrest only strengthened the JMM, bringing all the tribal voters together, and created a sympathy factor for him, as it had for Shibu Soren and former Chief Minister Madhu Koda in the past. He added: “These [arrests] had no negative impact on the mass support for these leaders. They managed to pull a crowd, banking on their tribal identity and projected the cases as witch hunts.”

The BJP also tried to rally voters around the issue of the removal of Champai Soren as Chief Minister just before the Assembly election but failed. (Champai Soren joined the BJP in late August.)

In the 2019 Assembly election, the BJP won only two of the 28 seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes, one of the reasons for which was the party’s decision to appoint a non-tribal person (Raghubar Das) as Chief Minister, a first for Jharkhand, after winning the 2014 Assembly election. This time around, the BJP went back to tribal leaders, either importing them from other parties or appointing the spouses of its own tribal faces, but nothing worked.

In Kolhan division, where the BJP was betting big on the back of Champai Soren, the results were a blow. Although he won his Saraikela seat, his son Babulal Soren lost from Ghatshila, and there was no Champai Soren impact in any other seat. The BJP fielded as many as 21 new faces to make a dent in JMM bastions, but the JMM-led alliance won 27 of the 28 reserved seats.

Speaking to Frontline, Ajay Gudavarthy, Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, said: “The BJP’s infiltration narrative led by Himanta Sarma did not impact Jharkhand as it is not a border State and infiltration is a problem the Central government needs to control. Jharkhand is a relatively backward State with heavy out-migration of labour to other parts of the country. The BJP’s lack of a social development agenda and [weak] local leadership became central issues for the electorate.”

There was a blitz by top BJP leaders, with 200 rallies and roadshows, including several by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a dozen each by Home Minister Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. It did not, however, seem to impact the Jharkhand voter.

Former BJP MPs Sudarshan Bhagat and Samir Oraon lost from Gumla and Bishunpur by over 26,000 and 32,000 votes, respectively. The BJP also lost its traditional seat of Khunti, where the veteran leader and MLA of five consecutive terms Nilkanth Singh Munda lost by over 42,000 votes. With the JMM winning 20 of the reserved seats and the Congress 7, both increased their tally by one each from 2019. The BJP’s one seat was a decline not only from the 11 it won in 2014 but also the two it won in 2019.

The JMM got the votes of not only the State’s dominant Santhal tribe, to which the Soren family belongs, but also of most of the State’s 32 other tribes, including eight Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, or PVTGs. In 2023, the JMM-led government announced free residential coaching for PVTG students in the State.

Failed pitch

Nowhere was the failure of the BJP’s polarisation pitch more evident than in Jamtara, where Shibu Soren’s eldest daughter-in-law, Sita Soren, the BJP’s candidate, lost to the Congress’ Irfan Ansari by over 43,000 votes. Prem Singh, a former teacher at Delhi University and former socialist leader, told Frontline: “The fact that the campaign issue of infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims into the State did not work for the BJP has made it clear that its communal campaign has not yet spread to the rural areas. The BJP is still a city-centric party in Jharkhand.”

Besides losing the tribal vote, the BJP’s hopes of coasting to victory on Kudmi support were also dashed, as Jairam Mahato’s JLKM got more votes than the margin of victory in a dozen seats. The Kudmis account for nearly 14 per cent of the votes, and their vote is key in over 30 seats. Jairam Mahato has emerged as the new Kudmi leader, denting the long-held fortress of the Sudesh Mahato-led AJSU. The BJP’s substantial gains in 2014 came after an alliance with the AJSU and were lost in equal measure in 2019 after they parted ways. This year too it announced an alliance with the AJSU, but it made little impact.

The AJSU managed to win only one of the 10 seats it fought in the election. The BJP’s other allies, the Janata Dal (United) and the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), bagged two seats and one seat, respectively. If the AJSU was the weak link in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the Congress, which had proven to be the weak link in the INDIA coalition in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, did a good job in Jharkhand by winning 16 of the 30 seats it contested.

Lesson for parties

Speaking to Frontline, former Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha, author of multiple books on Hindi heartland politics, said: “In Maharashtra, the Congress, as the senior alliance partner in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), was expected to do the heavy lifting, but it underperformed. A more resilient JMM helped the INDIA bloc romp home in Jharkhand comfortably.”

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He added: “In the end, the big lesson for political parties is that what works is the horses-for-courses policy, not a standard vanilla prescription for every State. Maharashtra was a complex conundrum; it needed more hyper-local attention to issues that disgruntled voters than what the Congress offered; the ‘democracy and Constitution is in danger’ narrative, albeit entirely true, was not the voters’ primary apprehension. The BJP’s vicious polarisation politics using a fabricated infiltration bogey failed in Jharkhand.”

Rasheed Kidwai, political commentator and author, said that the verdict was a powerful endorsement of Hemant Soren’s tribal leadership and connect with the masses. “Soren single-handedly dealt a blow to the NDA and the ‘agencies’ that reportedly played a role in his arrest. His call for tribal pride was effective and inspirational.”

Although the INDIA coalition was in full strength at Soren’s swearing-in ceremony, Kidwai felt that the warmth and bonhomie between the allies were missing. There is no doubt that the results in Jharkhand have given the INDIA coalition some respite after the debacle in Haryana in October and in Maharashtra in November. The big question, however, is if this win is enough to keep its resolve intact and allow it to regroup.