Jharkhand: An electoral history

A sub-committee of the Constituent Assembly on excluded and partially-excluded areas (other than Assam) that looked at the question of drawing up a scheme for the administration of tribal and backward areas, had very briefly considered a suggestion to create a new province in South Bihar.

After Independence, Jaipal Singh Munda’s Jharkhand Party fought the 1952 election on the issue of a tribal state, and won three seats in Lok Sabha and 32 (out of 330) in the Bihar Assembly. Subsequently, 36 members of the Bihar Assembly from the Chhotanagpur division and Santhal Parganas district made the case for a new state comprising today’s Jharkhand and parts of present-day Odisha and West Bengal before the States Reorganisation Commission.

The Commission rejected the demand on the grounds that “the plains are predominantly agricultural and the Chota Nagpur plateau provides an industrial balance”, and “the separation of South Bihar will affect the entire economy of the existing State”.

If Chhotanagpur were to be taken out, “the residual State…will be a poorer area with fewer opportunities and resources for development”, it said.
Jawaharlal Nehru and later, Jaiprakash Narayan, were in favour of a separate state; however, Bihar remained united. Through the decades, only one of the (undivided) state’s Chief Ministers (K B Sahay, 1963-67) came from this region; his predecessor, Binodanand Jha (1961-62), belonged to Deoghar (in present-day Jharkhand) but represented a different constituency.

Birth of the new state

On November 15, 2000, the NDA government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee created three new states — Jharkhand, Uttarakhand (then called Uttaranchal), and Chhattisgarh out of (undivided) Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh respectively.

Jharkhand, comprising 18 out of the 55 districts of undivided Bihar, got 81 of the state’s 324 Assembly seats and 14 of its 54 Lok Sabha seats. The tribal-dominated state, which was founded on the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, is among India’s richest in mineral reserves.

At the time Jharkhand was created, the most important tribal face of the BJP was Karia Munda. However Babulal Marandi, a 42-year-old tribal leader with a long association with the RSS, was chosen to be the state’s first CM. Marandi had helped the BJP win 12 of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the Jharkhand region in 1998, and had himself defeated JMM stalwart Shibu Soren in Dumka.

Infighting within BJP

The BJP in Jharkhand quickly split into two factions within the party, led by Marandi and Arjun Munda, a former JMM leader whom the first CM had brought into the saffron camp in 2000. Ranged against the BJP were, besides the JMM, Lalu Prasad’s RJD and the Congress.

In March 2003, Marandi had to make way for Munda as CM. In the Lok Sabha election of 2004, the BJP suffered a setback — Marandi won in Koderma, but the other 13 seats were swept by an alliance of the JMM, Congress, RJD, and CPI.

In the first Assembly election in the new state in 2005, the BJP fell short of the halfway mark in the 81-member House, and the Governor invited JMM’s Shibu Soren to form the government. However, Soren failed to prove his majority, and had to resign in 10 days. After the BJP cobbled together the numbers, Arjun Munda became Chief Minister of a coalition government. The following year, Babulal Marandi quit the BJP and formed his own party, the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha-Prajatantrik (JVM-P).

A decade of turmoil

After a year and a half in power, Munda was forced to make way for Madhu Koda, an Independent MLA who pulled support from the government and replaced him as Chief Minister with the backing of MLAs from a number of parties, some Independents, and the Congress.

But Koda lost power after the JMM ditched him, and Soren became CM again. In 2009, Koda was arrested for alleged corruption. Subsequently, he was convicted in the alleged coal scam and was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2017.

After a spell of President’s Rule, the BJP and JMM reached an alliance and Arjun Munda formed the government again with the JMM’s Hemant Soren as his deputy. However, the alliance did not last, and in July 2013, Hemant Soren became CM for the first time, with Arjun Munda as Leader of Opposition.

Non-tribal CM and after

In 2014, the Narendra Modi wave powered the BJP to 37 seats in the Jharkhand Assembly election (that followed the Lok Sabha election of that year). After putting together a majority, the party made the bold experiment of picking a non-tribal leader, Raghubar Das, to lead the state. Das, who is now Governor of Odisha, served for a full five years.

In 2019, however, the BJP was reduced to 25 seats, and the JMM-Congress alliance won a majority in the Assembly. Hemant became CM again, but had to resign after he was arrested in a case relating to an alleged land scam earlier this year.

He installed senior JMM leader Champai Soren in his place, but took back the chair on July 4 after returning from jail. A miffed Champai Soren is now with the BJP.

Also back in the BJP is Babulal Marandi, whose JVM-P contested various elections in the state until 2019. Marandi is now the president of the Jharkhand BJP, and the face of the party in the state. Arjun Munda, who was a Minister in the Modi government at the Centre until earlier this year, is keeping a low profile.