New Delhi: After being in the Enforcement Directorate (ED)’s custody for over eight hours, Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren was arrested on Wednesday (January 31) in a case of alleged money laundering linked to a land scam.
Meanwhile, reports from Ranchi said the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) has announced senior party leader and the state’s transport minister, Champai Soren, as leader of the JMM’s legislative party and that he is set to replace Hemant Soren as chief minister.
On Tuesday, Hemant Soren led a meeting of party legislators in which all MLAs are reported to have signed two blank proposals backing Hemant’s wife Kalpana Soren and Champai Soren respectively as the next chief minister in the event of Hemant Soren’s arrest.
Hemant Soren has sent in his resignation to governor C.P. Radhakrishnan, while his party MLAs waited to meet the governor to back Champai Soren as the chief minister.
Having anticipated that he may be arrested on January 31 when the ED would come to question him, Soren refused to sign the arrest memo until he submitted his resignation to the governor.
The ED sleuths subsequently took him to the governor’s house, where he submitted his resignation, opening the window for Champai Soren to stake claim to form the government.
Sources said that Hemant Soren feared that his arrest may allow the Union government to impose president’s rule in the state on the basis of failure of constitutional machinery.
Soren also invoked the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against the ED officers for allegedly harassing him.
JMM MLAs condemned the ED action, claiming that the raids and the possible arrest of the chief minister were “high handed” and reeked of a political conspiracy.
Champai Soren is considered close to Hemant Soren and is a legislator from the Saraikela constituency. He is hugely popular in his seat.
Mahua Maji, a Rajya Sabha MP, has confirmed to the media that Hemant Soren has been arrested, although the ED is yet to give a statement.
The ruling coalition led by the JMM enjoys a majority of 49 legislators in the 81-member assembly. All legislators are reportedly unanimous in choosing Champai Soren to replace Hemant Soren.
This includes 29 from the JMM, 16 from the Congress, one from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), one from the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation (CPI(ML)L) and one from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).
Hemant Soren was served multiple ED notices but had refused to cooperate, claiming that the Union government was misusing the agency to destabilise the opposition government in the state in a case that should ideally be heard in a civil court.
However, the ED swooped in on the chief minister’s New Delhi residence on January 30, where it displayed Rs 36 lakh as seized cash, an allegedly bemani BMW car and a few ‘incriminating documents’. Soren has said that the cash and car do not belong to him.
The BJP, meanwhile, declared Hemant Soren as a “missing person” since he was not present at his Delhi residence. However, hours later, the chief minister held a legislative party meeting to decide the future course of action, while saying that he was busy in pre-scheduled meetings and budget preparations.
The matter is yet another instance of the political rows between the Modi government and opposition parties, who have frequently termed such ED action against opposition leaders as political vendetta.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said the action against Soren was to “tear federalism to shreds”.
“Intimidating opposition leaders by making the provisions of PMLA draconian is part of the BJP’s tool kit. The BJP’s work of destabilising the opposition governments one by one as part of a conspiracy is continuing,” he said in Hindi on X (formerly Twitter).
Rahul Gandhi said Union government agencies like the ED, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Income Tax (I-T) Department no longer remained government agencies but had become “the BJP’s ‘eliminate the opposition’ cell”.
“Itself steeped in corruption, the BJP is running a campaign to destroy democracy in its obsession with power,” he said on X in Hindi.
Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary of the CPI(ML)L said on X that Soren’s arrest marked “a brazen escalation of the Modi regime’s ongoing war on the opposition”, adding that his party would support Champai Soren as Jharkhand’s new chief minister.
Rajya Sabha MP of the Uddhav Thackeray faction of the Shiv Sena, Priyanka Chaturvedi wrote that the ED, CBI and I-T Department had “become courtiers in the court of the BJP”.
INDIA alliance leaders held a meeting at Kharge’s house in Delhi on Wednesday evening to discuss the Jharkhand chief minister’s arrest. Those in attendance included Sonia Gandhi, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, NCP supremo Sharad Pawar and DMK leader T.R. Baalu, PTI reported. The opposition leaders have also said that they will be staging a protest on Thursday. Several tribal rights organisations in the state have also announced a ‘Jharkhand Bandh’ on Thursday.
This is a developing story.