The top leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is leaving no stone unturned to win over former chief minister and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader Champai Soren – but with a different gameplan – as the defeats of election-eve turncoats Sita Soren and Geeta Koda are fresh in mind. They deserted the JMM and Congress respectively to contest the Lok Sabha poll on the BJP ticket only to face humiliating defeat.
Instead of taking him directly into the party, the BJP has adopted the Maharashtra strategy where it had engineered a split in Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party. The efforts are on to break JMM notwithstanding the fact that the BJP had lost all the five Scheduled Tribes reserved parliamentary seats of Jharkhand in the 2024 election. This included the then Union minister Arjun Munda, who lost from Khunti. The National Democratic Alliance tally came down from 12 in 2019 to nine out of the total 14 seats in the state.
Infighting in BJP
The BJP fears that the open induction of Champai may add fuel to the flame as the loss of all five tribal seats had sparked off infighting within the party, with Sita charging former MP Sunil Soren and other senior leaders of conspiring against her. Sita, who had been a JMM MLA since 2009, is the widow of Durga Sren, the eldest son of JMM patriarch, Shibu Soren.
She ditched the party after Champai Soren was made the chief minister following the arrest of Hemant Soren on January 31. The BJP was quick to give her a ticket from the Dumka ST reserved seat replacing sitting MP, Sunil Soren, whose name was cleared in the first list. But she lost to Nalin Soren of JMM by over 22,000 votes.
Similarly, Geeta Koda, wife of former chief minister Madhu Koda, won the 2019 Lok Sabha election from Singhbhum on a Congress party ticket. But on the eve of the 2024 polls, she crossed over to the BJP, which did not hesitate in giving a ticket to her. The party forgot the widespread campaign it had launched against her husband, Madhu Koda, who was forced to resign and go to jail. Geeta lost to Jabo Manjhi, a fellow Ho, of JMM by a big margin of 1.68 lakh votes.
Though the BJP still pins its hope on the non-tribal and Mahto votes things are not so smooth here too. Supporters of Godda MP, Nishikant Dubey, and Deoghar MLA, Narayan Das, openly clashed at an election review meeting of the party held on June 17.
Kolhan Tiger
Champai, 68, took over as the chief minister on February 2, just two days after the arrest of the
then chief minister, Hemant Soren, by the Enforcement Directorate. He was made to quit on July 4 after Hemant Soren got bail from the Jharkhand high court on June 28. He was taken into the cabinet by Hemant.
Champai is known as Kolhan Tiger as he was said to have played a key role in consolidating the base of the JMM in this industrial and mineral-rich region in the south. Jamshedpur is its most important city. Ho and Munda tribes are found in substantial numbers here. Champai, a six-time MLA, represents Saraikela seat, which is situated near the border of Odisha.
Like Shibu Soren, Champai is a Santhal, who form one-third of the Adivasi population of the state. Their strongest concentration is in the Santhal Parganas division which is situated in the north-eastern part of Jharkhand, bordering Bihar and West Bengal.
The Marandi factor
The problem with the BJP is that it lost a lot of support within the Adivasis (who form more than 26% of population) after it made a non-tribal, Raghubar Das, the chief minister following the victory in the 2014 Assembly election. Das adopted policies which, according to tribal leaders, promoted the same corporate lobby against whom the JMM had fought bitterly. He got arrested thousands of tribals who protested against his government’s land acquisition policy.
As Das had lost his own East Jamshedpur seat at the hands of BJP rebel, Saryu Roy (who is now state chief of alliance partner Janata Dal United), in the December 2019 Assembly election, the party, in a state of panic, within two months re-inducted former chief minister Babulal Marandi. The latter merged his Jharkhand Vikas Morcha with BJP on February 17, 2020. He had left the saffron party in 2006.
But Marandi, now the state BJP president, is alarmed over the way in which his party’s central leadership is trying to allure Champai. The latter would definitely split the JMM only if he is assured of the CM post by the BJP. Otherwise, he is already well-placed in JMM and a minister in the Hemant cabinet enjoying the number two position.
Whatever Champai may be saying now at the behest of the BJP, the truth is that the JMM made him CM ignoring the claim of Hemant’s wife Kalpana and his younger brother, Basant.
Notwithstanding the chaotic situation in the faction-ridden BJP in Jharkhand, the top brass of the party is not averse to the idea of poaching leaders from the INDIA bloc parties. The party had not learnt any lesson after the humiliating defeat it suffered in Maharashtra in the recently held Lok Sabha poll where its tally came down from 41 to 17.
Time is running out for the BJP to engineer a split in JMM and Congress and install Champai as the chief minister and compel Marandi, like Devendra Fadnavis, to become deputy CM. Or it may be that the BJP will go to poll with the understanding that Champai would be its CM face. What will happen to Marandi then? Only time will tell.
