Terms of Trade | The legacy of Shibu Soren

Shibu Soren's political life was spent agitating, negotiating and to some extent also vacillating, to preserve his and his party’s political interests.

People who have not spent time in Jharkhand will find it difficult to comprehend what Shibu Soren meant and brought to that part of the country. This author spent part of his early childhood in an industrial town in present day Jharkhand and was a higher secondary student in Ranchi when Jharkhand was formed in 2000. While Shibu Soren’s politics started in the 1970s – it was triggered by moneylenders killing his father, pushing him to mobilise tribals against such exploitation – the four and a half decades since the 1980s, which this author has had a snapshot view of, give a good idea of the politics and legacy of Soren and his political project, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM).

Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader Shibu Soren passed away at a hospital in Delhi on August 4. (PTI)

Parts of what is today Jharkhand were the vanguard regions of India’s early push towards state-led industrialisation. Steel mills, thermal power plants, hydel power projects, fertiliser factories, the region had it all. This author’s grandfather was a chemist in Bokaro Thermal Power Station, one of the oldest thermal power plants in the country, built by the Damodar Valley Corporation, which itself was inspired by the Tennessee Valley project in the US. My earliest memories of the JMM’s politics are its tribal activists armed with bows and arrows and carrying the party’s green flag periodically gheraoing the Labour Commissioner’s office opposite our house. While these demonstrations were largely benign, although still fascinating to a five-year-old, the JMM was involved in far more radical activities in Jharkhand from reclaiming tribal land allegedly illegally appropriated by non-tribals to calling for blockades of movement of coal and other valuable minerals from the state. Violence and chaos often accompanied these .

It was only later that I was able to connect the dots about what was driving these protests. Despite being one of the sites of early industrialisation in India, tribals, the original inhabitants of this region, gained very little from this process. They were hardly to be seen even in the most menial blue-collar jobs, let alone white-collar jobs in public sector units which had come up in the state, and almost always ended up drawing the shortest straw in the local political economy bargain. It was this discrimination and exclusion which triggered the demand for the separate state of Jharkhand, which, to be sure, predates Soren’s politics. And it was the joy of achieving this which I saw first-hand on the streets of Ranchi when the state was finally carved out of Jharkhand in the winter of 2000, with groups of tribal men and women breaking into their traditional Sarhul dance across the entire city. These celebrations, and the good times the tribals hoped for, however, would not last very long.

As irony would have it, Soren did not get to become the chief minister of the new state despite being seen as the godfather of the movement for the creation of the state. His two and a half decades in politics by then had also corroded some of his rabble-rousing fighting credentials to that of a corruptible and tarnished politician – he was accused in the infamous JMM Bribery case to save the Narsimha Rao government and also faced criminal charges including those of murder – who was only interested in power. One of the headlines I remember from 2000 is Soren blatantly refusing to support the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the state and saying that he did not lead the movement for a separate state to let someone else become the chief minister. Soren’s challenges increased manifold after the success of his most cherished political project, the creation of Jharkhand. He managed to become the chief minister of the state for a while, but the JMM’s hold on power was anything but stable. Soren himself suffered a humiliating loss in a by-poll in 2009 and had to resign from the union cabinet after being indicted in a murder case. Not just the JMM, but almost the entire political class, especially its tribal leadership, in the new state was tarnished in allegations of large-scale corruption which reached a nadir with the independent tribal chief minister Madhu Koda allegedly selling mines to business groups in exchange for large bribes, something which hit at the very core of the tribal assertion against usurping of local wealth by outsiders. With the BJP winning the 2014 assembly elections in Jharkhand and making a non-tribal chief minister, and Soren himself losing his parliamentary constituency of Dumka in the 2019 elections, it looked like JMM’s political project and Soren’s politics were headed for oblivion.

But JMM’s premature political obituaries were challenged by its back-to-back victories in 2019 and 2024 assembly elections, which were fought and won under the leadership of Soren’s son, Hemant. The older Soren was largely in the background as the cultified patriarch. To be sure, Hemant and Shibu Soren have a very different approach to politics in the state. The former unlike the latter, is happy to share power and make alliances, has learnt the importance of wooing not just the tribal but also the non-tribal poor – this is what the cash transfer scheme for women seeks – and most importantly, is ready to speak a new language of self-respect and dignity to the core tribal voter who has moved on from the glorification of the successful battle for creation of Jharkhand. To be sure, Hemant knows the importance of going back to the core tribal militancy plank when needed and this exactly is what he did when the BJP government tried to change the land ownership rules in the state after 2014. He was vindicated big time when the then governor of the state and current president Droupadi Murmu, also a Scheduled Tribe, returned the amended Chotanagpur Tenancy Act to the BJP government in the state, questioning its benefits to the tribal people. This, in many ways, generated a huge tailwind for JMM’s quest to capture power in 2019.

Shibu Soren never really enjoyed state power in Jharkhand while he was active in politics. His political life was spent agitating, negotiating and to some extent also vacillating to preserve his and his party’s political interests. The more his agitational project succeeded, the more compromised his politics risked looking. But the political project he started is at its peak at the time of his passing. Not only is the JMM in power in the state today, the question of scheduled tribe identity which Soren and many of his successful and not-so-successful contemporaries always fought for is also pretty successful with the chief ministers of Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh – they have a significant population of tribals in the eastern/central India region – all being STs today.

The battle for larger political economic inclusion of tribals in this region – they are still the poorest and among the most exploited on various fronts – is still a work in progress, to put it politely. It is towards this cherished goal that politicians like Shibu Soren made an important contribution, notwithstanding the controversies they courted and the follies they committed. Indian democracy will always be grateful to these sons of the soil who shot the proverbial arrow of tribal resistance through the glass ceiling of politics, which, left to itself would have never allowed the tribal citizen to claim his agency in politics and policy.

Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa