‘Governor’ Raghubar Das: The long winter of Jharkhand’s first non-tribal CM continues

The other new governor appointed on Wednesday was Nallu Indrasena Reddy, 70, a senior BJP leader and former three-time MLA from Telangana, who now moves into the Raj Bhavan in Tripura.

If Das’s appointment as CM was stunning, his isolation was unceremonious following the BJP’s loss in 2019 to the JMM-led UPA in Jharkhand. Das was himself defeated from his bastion. The BJP had lost no time in bringing back Babulal Marandi, a tall tribal leader and Jharkhand’s first CM, who had left the saffron party in 2006 and formed his own party the same year.

Marandi was first made legislative party leader and, a month ago, the state BJP chief.

Even if the scales were heavily tilted since in Marandi’s favour, Das was still considered as being in the reckoning if the BJP returned to power in 2024, along with Union Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda. Till Wednesday night, with the appointment as governor virtually retiring Das, and clearing the path for Marandi.

At 68, Das is some years short of the BJP’s unofficial retirement age of 75.

Earlier too, the BJP has moved senior leaders out of states as governor when faced with intractable choices.

Expressing their shock, sources close to Das said that he had given the BJP in the state a new lease of life by putting JMM chief Hemant Soren in the dock, with his revelation that the CM owned a mining lease while holding the Mining and Environment portfolios.

Das’s revelation had created uncertainty over Soren’s fate, with the Election Commission approached as well as the Jharkhand High Court. The matter died a slow death later, reportedly after the BJP could not muster up enough numbers to make a move for power in case of Soren’s disqualification.

“This showed that Das had a certain future in state politics. It was believed that the Centre may make him a Rajya Sabha MP and possibly a Central minister,” a source said, suggesting the surprise over the governor appointment.

However, others feel Das rubbed the powers that be the wrong way by dropping hints that the 2019 loss was due to anger against the BJP, and not him. His open squabbling with rebel RSS / BJP leader Saryu Roy, who defeated him in 2019, did not help.

Das’s climb to the top of Jharkhand politics had been long and hard. An OBC leader, he was the son of a labourer and the family struggled to give an education to him and his six siblings. Enrolled to study law, he had his first brush with politics in college days, starting with the student movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan against the Indira Gandhi government.

Like many others, he moved from there to the Janata Party, and has been part of the BJP since it was officially formed in 1980.

His first election was to the undivided Bihar Assembly in 1995, from Jamshedpur East, a constituency he won five times before losing in 2019. He was briefly made Urban Development Minister in 2005, and then served as Deputy CM between December 2009 and May 2010. In 2014, he became the state’s first non-tribal CM. His five-year reign without any major instability was one of the first such in the state.

As CM, Das was accused of running the government through the bureaucracy, and criticised for pulling up officials in public. A source said: “He used to sideline the CMO and depended on departmental secretaries to carry out works. But he never kept files pending and speeded up decision-making.” Another source gave the example of the ‘Momentum Jharkhand’ investment event, where no money was spared, including on an advertisement campaign.

A source close to him said that having withstood several hurdles in his life, Das would soon get over the latest. “He had taken his 2019 defeat in his stride, and started preparing for his next election. Now he has taken this decision too in his stride.”

Indrasena Reddy, the new governor of Tripura, was the face of the BJP in the 1980s and 1990s in Hyderabad and the Telangana region of undivided Andhra Pradesh. In his first election, from Malakpet in 1983, he defeated then Andhra home minister K Prabhakar Reddy. Indrasena went on to win the seat again in 1985 and 1999.

He was also the BJP’s floor leader in the state Assembly, before serving as the Andhra unit chief from 2003 to 2007. After his stint as an MLA for nearly 10 years, Indrasena contested several times from various Lok Sabha seats, but was unsuccessful.

He had lately taken on the role of a mentor in the BJP, and groomed several leaders in Telangana, according to colleagues. He is currently a national executive committee member of the party.

Like Das, Indrasena started out as a student leader, and was a member of the Janata Party. During the Emergency, he was imprisoned. He later joined the BJP, and as a young party leader, survived a stabbing attack by the Radical Students’ Union (RSU).

(With inputs from Sreenivas Janyala in Hyderabad)