Home alone, Soren sits by the phone, waiting for PM’s call

His house now wears a deathly look. Sons Durga and Hemant—both lost the elections, the second to JMM rebel Stephen Marandi who later made up with Soren to share power for a while—have given politics a break. At least, for now.

While Durga, the elder of the two sons who surrendered his Jama seat, is down with malaria, Hemant has floated a company called Pratibimb to venture into the booming construction sector. ‘‘Let’s see how lady luck treats me in this field,’’ says Hemant.

Ask his staff about the loneliness of Soren and they snap back. ‘‘All this talk is rubbish. Guruji is a revolutionary. He will bounce back in great style. Let them do what they can. He will become CM again,’’ says JMM secretary Shailendra Bhattacharya.

But six of Soren’s allies are already in trouble. RJD’s Girinath Singh, Prakash Ram and Uday Shanker Singh, Congress’s Pradeep Balmuchu, United Goan Democratic Party’s Bandhu Tirkey and the Independent Stephen Marandi—they were all with him when he was CM for a week—are now trying to ward off the threat of disqualification from the Assembly membership.

There are two cases which have landed them in a spot. In the first case, filed by former MLA Kamla Kant Sinha on March 23, Marandi’s disqualification was sought on the ground that he had ‘‘voluntarily’’ given up the JMM membership to contest and get elected as an Independent though he was a JMM Rajya Sabha MP.

‘‘As such Marandi has entitled himself to be disqualified in terms of paragraph 2(1)(A) of the Tenth Schedule read with Article 191(2) of the Constitution of India,’’ states Sinha’s petition.

The second case is to do with Independent MLA Enos Ekka, an ally of the ruling NDA, who had contested the polls on a Jharkhand Party ticket. Apparently, in their hurry to demand Ekka’s disqualification on March15—the day CM Arjun Munda won the vote of confidence—these six MLAs of the RJD, Congress, UGDP and the Independent made a blunder. They listed their demand in separate affidavits but stated in common that they were ‘‘members’’ of the JMM.

‘‘These affidavits were meant for the JMM legislators. By sheer mistake, they signed them,’’ a JMM MLA said. For Speaker Inder Singh Namdhari and Chief Minister Munda, these ‘affidavits’ can now be used to keep the MLAs in check.

Admits Assembly secretary Sita Ram Sahni: ‘‘As per the amended Tenth Schedule, the Speaker is all powerful. Apart from disqualifying them on the charge of misinforming him, he (Speaker) can even lodge an FIR against them under Section 181 of the IPC.’’ For Soren and friends, these are hard days.