As BJP loses all tribal seats in Jharkhand, heat over arrest of Hemant Soren, its state chief Babulal Marandi

The results also portend tough going for the BJP in the Assembly elections due at the end of the year. The five tribal Lok Sabha seats translate into 28 ST-reserved Assembly constituencies.

The biggest reason for tribal disenchantment with the BJP is believed to be the jailing of JMM chief and INDIA bloc leader Hemant Soren, in the run-up to the elections, in an alleged land-grabbing case. Soren stepped down as Chief Minister before his arrest, naming Champai Soren in his place. Hemant Soren’s wife Kalpana won in the bypolls held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha elections, making her electoral debut.

A Ranchi-based JMM leader said: “The BJP thought it could break the party or impose President’s Rule once Hemant Soren was arrested. Smartly, Soren resigned before being arrested, which gave the BJP no room to experiment… In various tribal pockets, the refrain was ‘Unko kaam nahi karne de raha hai (The Centre is not letting Hemant Soren work)’.”

Kalpana, who campaigned across Jharkhand, also invoked the “injustice” meted out to her husband, an “Adivasi CM”.

Another factor, sources said, was INDIA bloc’s success in mobilising the Christian tribal vote behind it, playing on minority fears regarding the BJP. Christian tribal leaders, in turn, successfully mobilised the non-tribal Christian vote, and this is believed to have been crucial in seats like Lohardaga and Khunti.

In Khunti, the BJP’s Arjun Munda lost to the Congress’s Kalicharan Munda by more than 1.49 lakh votes.

While the JMM has put its weight behind the demand that the Sarna faith followed by tribals be recognised as a separate religion, the community has bad memories of the previous BJP government in the state, led incidentally by the state’s first and only non-tribal CM, Raghubar Das. The Das government had tried to tweak tenancy Acts in Jharkhand, in existence since British times, which disallow transfer of tribal land to any non-tribal, among others.

A Congress leader in Khunti said: “In 2019, many villagers affected by the Pathalgadi movement had boycotted the elections. This time, they came out in numbers to vote against the BJP because many were booked for sedition, among other charges, by the Das government.”

A senior BJP leader also admitted that “tribals as a whole rallied against the party” and acknowledged the impact of the Pathalgadi movement. Under the agitation, tribals had erected stone plaques reiterating rights granted to them under the 5th Schedule of the Constitution, and stopped government officials from entering several parts of the state.

Civil society organisations in Jharkhand also rallied against the BJP this time, urging tribals during frequent village-level visits to cast a vote for “saving democracy and the Constitution” – a message that mirrored the INDIA bloc’s.

Jharkhand Congress chief Rajesh Thakur said the INDIA bloc victory in all the five tribal seats – in fact the only constituencies won by them in the state, with the NDA winning the remaining nine – was the result of the alliance’s “hard work”.

Claiming “some anger” against state BJP leaders also because they had never fought on ‘Jal, Jungle, Zameen (water, forest, land)’ issues, Thakur told The Indian Express: “For instance, Arjun Munda did not espouse the Adivasi cause (despite being a tribal)… Even Geeta Koda, who defected at the last moment to the BJP from the Congress, lost (from Singhbhum) despite a substantial tribal vote bank of her own.”

He added: “In contrast, we were able to communicate to the people the BJP’s divisive agenda, and its plans to change the Constitution.” Thakur also credited Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra for this, pointing to the good support it had got in Simdega and Khunti areas.

He admitted though that the party may have fallen short on conveying its manifesto promises, “with many migrants not coming out to vote”.

With the tribal vote escaping the BJP, murmurs have begun against the party’s embrace of Marandi 14 years after he had left, ostensibly angry over his removal as CM due to the backlash over his government’s controversial domicile policy. The Marandi policy said documents held by people going back up to the year 1932 would be used to determine whether they were a domicile of the state.

Sources pointed out that top positions in the BJP are now occupied by former leaders of the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik), the party floated by Marandi after leaving the BJP in 2006. He had merged it with the BJP in 2020, when he returned to the party.

However, people close to Marandi said he has always put winnability over any other factor. A source in the Ranchi BJP said: “Party candidates such as Sita Soren and Geeta Koda could have won if they had joined us four-five months before the elections (rather than so close to polls).”

Sunil Tiwari, an aide and political advisor of Marandi, downplayed the impact of Hemant Soren’s arrest as well. “There is no anger in the tribal community over this… I think we could not counter Kalpana Soren’s narrative of ‘Hemant being jailed for nothing or, rather, for doing people’s work’. The BJP failed to communicate at the grassroots the evidence regarding corruption charges against Hemant Soren,” Tiwari said.