Ranchi: The BJP’s victory march was halted once again in Jharkhand, leaving the party to ponder what went wrong there. The writing was on the wall. Even though the Lok Sabha elections were fought in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the achievements of his government, the BJP had won nine of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the state, three seats less than the 12 it had won in 2019.
The same trend continued and the BJP had to endure the ignominy of winning fewer seats than what it had secured in the state in the 2018 polls, It is apparent that Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s arrest by the Enforcement Directorate in January went against the BJP as the state’s electorate, especially Soren’s fellow tribal voters, took it as an affront.
All endeavors of the BJP to woo the tribal voters, including promising the moon through its m.festo, failed to work. BJP even renamed a busy crossing in faraway Delhi as Birsa Munda Chowk, but such gestures failed to impact the outcome. The BJP seemingly never digested its 2019 defeat in the Jharkhand assembly elections at the height of Modi’s wave. All these five years it kept toying with the idea of displacing Hemant Soren and installing its own government through the backdoor.
The row began with Soren’s injudicious decision to give a small parcel of land on lease to one of his comp.es. Though Soren claimed ignorance of illegality and surrendered the plot, BJP created a big stir, knocking on the doors of the Jharkhand High Court and the Election Commission to disqualify him over corruption charges.
The EC recommended Soren’s disqualification in a sealed envelope to then Governor Ramesh Bias, who sat for long over it. Finally, Soren was arrested in January on corruption charges by the ED, only to walk out on bail after five months when the Jharkhand High Court rejected the ED’s claims, noting that none of the revenue records “bear the imprint of the direct involvement of the petitioner (Soren)”.
Soren emerged from Ranchi’s Birsa Munda Jail with a new bearded look and successfully convinced voters that he was a victim of BJP’s vendetta politics. As allegations of corruption faded into the background, the BJP’s attempts to split the JMM and Congress, its positioning as tribal champions, and its ‘‘Bantenge to Katenge’ campaign targeting Bangladeshi infiltration fell flat. It failed to explain how a chief minister of a landlocked state could be responsible for cross-border infiltration.
