Stuart Corbridge	|   Print |
01.25.2008	|   PDF |

The course of political life in Jharkhand has not run smooth since the State was carved out of Bihar in 2000, the 28th to become part of the Indian Union. In its short history, the state has seen it all: Naxalism, an RSS presence, bribery cases, and murder, not to mention five chief ministers in seven years.

 

As recently as October 2007, tragedy hit the family of Babulal Marandi, the first chief minister of Jharkhand, when his son Arup was among 17 persons killed in what was reported to be a Naxalite attack on Chilkhadia village in Giridih district.  The village lies close to the Kodarma constituency which the former CM now holds as an independent Member of Parliament.  A one-time activist of the right wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Marandi resigned from the Bharatiya Janata Dal, the political wing of the RSS, in 2006, forcing a by-election in one of Jharkhand’s mining heartlands.  His victory means that the BJP no longer has a Parliamentary presence in Jharkhand. 

 

Ten months earlier, in December 2006, Shibu Soren was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to murder his ex-private secretary, Shashinath Jha, in 1994.  Soren, or Guruji (venerable teacher) as he was popularly known, was a respected adivasi (tribal; literally, original dwellers) activist for the Jharkhand cause in the 1970s and one of the leading lights of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha.  Things turned sour, however, when MPs belonging to the JMM were bribed to prop up the P. V. Narasimha Rao government at the center during a no-confidence motion in 1993.  It is alleged that Jha was killed – on Soren’s orders – after he tried to muscle in on the bribe. 

 

So what exactly has been going on in Jharkhand? Wasn’t the State founded to bring fresh hope to the adivasi communities so long victimised by dikus (outsiders) from the plains of Bihar and elsewhere?  Wasn’t it the culmination of India’s longest running regionalist movement, a movement led in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s by Jaipal Singh, and then through the next three decades by Soren? 

 

Yes and no.  The Jharkhand movement has been around for almost a century.  However, the state was officially founded on November 15, 2000, the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda (1875-1900), the great freedom fighter from the town of Ranchi, now the state capital.  And Singh’s Jharkhand Party was the major opposition party to Congress in Bihar in the 1950s, when it represented many of the region’s adivasi communities.  But those communities were never united.  Neither was the leadership of the Jharkhand movement, which fractured badly in the 1960s.  The Jharkhand Party drew strong support from Christian tribals in particular, a point not lost on the Jana Sangh and the RSS.  Likewise, the JMM relies heavily on Santals, one of the major adivasi tribes.  The party has never done well in Chhota Nagpur. 

 

In her book Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Headcounts in India (Cambridge University Press, 2004), the political scientist Kanchan Chandra says the JMM is mainly an ethnic party, rather than an adivasior regionalist party, and she is right in key respects.  The party tried hard in the 1970s to build support among industrial workers in Dhanbad, where A. K. Roy was a key figure.  It also made efforts to bring sadans– long-settled non-tribals – into the fold, as did Ram Dayal Munda and the cultural wing of a broader Jharkhand movement.  But voting patterns suggest that Santals mainly vote for Santals and Mundas for Mundas.  And neither Santals or Mundas, nor Hos or Oraons refer to many of the remaining 26  Scheduled Tribal communities in Bihar-Jharkhand as ‘adivasi’, or original settlers.  Local identities and state-constructed identities are two different things.

 

 

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Stuart Corbridge is Professor of Human Geography at the Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics.