BJP's Jharkhand loss: Rout in Adivasi swath

Radhika Ramaseshan

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Senior Journalist

IN 2016, Raghubar Das, the just-unseated Jharkhand CM of the Bharatiya Janata Party, did the unthinkable — he amended two laws — the Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908, and the Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act, 1949, that were cast in stone. Both laws protected the rights of the Adivasis over their land and properties, imposing almost inviolable restrictions on acquisition and sale. The very antiquity of the legislations revealed that even the colonial rulers displayed a measure of sensitivity towards the Adivasis who comprise 26.3 per cent of Jharkhand’s population. Das, Jharkhand’s first non-Adivasi chief minister, intended to loosen the provisions of the tenancy Acts and free up the use of land for other objectives, mainly infrastructure creation.

There was an outcry in the areas dominated by the tribes who launched the ‘Pathalgadi Movement’, where stone plaques, etched with the clauses in the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution and the Panchayat (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, or PESA, were erected on the boundaries of villages to assert their autonomy.

The PESA was enacted by the Centre to guarantee self-governance through traditional gram sabhas for those living in Scheduled Areas. Jharkhand’s first Adivasi Governor, Draupadi Murmu, refused to sign the new laws, citing the stir as the reason. By that time, Das had unleashed his police on the Adivasis. They rounded up the protestors and charged them with waging a war against the state, kidnapping and even rape.

It’s premature to correlate the 2016 events with the outcome in the 28 ST seats in the Jharkhand elections because the reasons for the victory or defeat might be many and complex. But compared with 2014, when the ST seats were evenly divided between the BJP and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, that led a coalition which romped home in the current polls, the BJP won just two ST seats, Torpa and Khunti, while the JMM and its ally, the Congress, mopped up the rest with handsome margins.

What does the BJP’s rout in the Adivasi swath tell on its central leadership’s audacious move to anoint a backward caste CM in a state that was birthed in 2000 on its tribal identity? A pet obsession of the BJP from the time Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were carved out as separate states was about the leadership’s social identity. A notion was if Chhattisgarh, with a larger Adivasi population, could live with non-tribal chief ministers, the BJP’s Raman Singh is a Rajput while the present CM Bhupesh Baghel of the Congress is a backward caste Kurmi, why should Jharkhand be an exception? Why did this debate originate? Did it have to do with the remarkable history of the Adivasis of Jharkhand whose uprisings against the colonialists, documented far less in the chronicles of the times than those led by the mainline politicians, except by subaltern historians? Did it have to do with the presence of the Christian missions and the charge that they ‘forced’ large-scale conversions of the Adivasis? Indeed, the RSS’s campaign spurred its own tribal wing, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, to step up its activities, ostensibly to stem proselytisation.

The BJP possibly didn’t weigh in the larger, ideological debate when the choice fell on Das, who is from a sub-caste of the oil-pressers. The short-term imperative was to consolidate the sizeable number of backward castes, who traditionally divided their votes between the BJP, Congress and the AJSU, led by Sudesh Mahto. In terms of sheer arithmetic, the BJP’s calculation should have worked because the backward castes, combined with the upper castes, make for a formidable constituency.

Das, a former employee of Tata Steel, Jamshedpur, aspired to be a Modi simulacrum. He was diligent and institutionalised long working hours in Jharkhand’s offices, an anathema to the employees. But he became allegedly ‘inaccessible’and that can be a death blow in a cadre-driven party that recognises only two leaders and no more. Try to be another Modi or even Amit Shah, and we will show you your place, was a refrain that began as a whisper in the Jharkhand BJP and grew into a clamour by the time the elections came. Saryu Rai, a senior minister who rebelled, fought as an Independent and defeated Das from Jamshedpur (East), was not a one-off phenomenon. He reflected the sentiments of the BJP’s rank-and-file because as an old-timer who built the party in undivided Bihar, he was regarded as a collective conscience minder. The BJP brass stood by Das because he was their handpicked person as were Haryana’s Manohar Lal Khattar, Maharashtra’s Devendra Fadnavis and Himachal’s Jairam Thakur.

The Jharkhand election was not just about Adivasi assertion. If that was the case, the JMM combine’s spread would not be across the state, because it triumphed even in urban and semi-urban seats, considered to be the BJP’s own in the past.

Doubtless, the JMM and its leader, the low-key Hemant Soren crafted a campaign that adhered largely to local issues, of which there wasn’t a dearth. Soren refused to be drawn into the polemics over citizenship identification, the Ram temple or the abrogation of Article 370, knowing he did not have a chance to score a point over the BJP. These very issues overwhelmed the BJP’s discourse, particularly in the phases in which the seats on the Jharkhand-West Bengal border polled. These constituencies have a large Bengali-speaking population. While the Ram temple didn’t sway the Hindu Adivasis as it did in the past, the trends suggested that CAA-NRC provoked a counter-consolidation of the votes in the places where the Bengali-speaking electorate counted. For the BJP, it was damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The national and the regional coalesced to create dynamics that worked against the BJP. Would the results occasion a re-think on the use of ultra-nationalism in future elections? That’s unlikely. The BJP is not one to calibrate, much less abandon, its core beliefs, however provocative and polarising, and certainly not in the Modi-Shah order.