Ecostani | Jan 31: ED arrests JMM chief. Feb 5: New CM, from JMM, wins trust vote
Hemant Soren says the BJP used agencies to topple his government as he is a tribal. The BJP, in turn, knows it needs a tribal leader for a headway in Jharkhand.
The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)-led ruling grand alliance won the trust vote with a clear majority in the state assembly on February 5, five days after its chief and Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren resigned, after he was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The JMM will consider this a moral victory for the alliance before the Lok Sabha polls, where the ruling alliance will be pitted against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Jharkhand is the only state in the Hindi heartland other than Himachal Pradesh, which is ruled by a non-BJP party from the Opposition alliance, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). So was Bihar till January 29, when chief minister Nitish Kumar returned to NDA.
Had the JMM-led alliance failed to win the trust vote, it could have further weakened the INDIA bloc, which is yet to strike a seat-sharing pact in any state. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has already expressed disinterest in a seat-sharing agreement with the Congress and the Left Parties, two important components of the bloc. There is no clarity on Congress’s seat sharing with Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 MPs to Lok Sabha — the SP recently announced 11 seats that the Congress will contest on, but the latter’s response, or rather the lack of it, was telling.
Read more: Is all well in INDIA seat-sharing talks in UP?
Political instability in Jharkhand would have helped the BJP and the NDA. However, a comfortable majority (of 47 votes including a nominated member) for the JMM-led alliance, as against the opposition’s 29 votes, shows that the former CM still holds sway in the alliance. In the House, 77 members, including the nominated member were present; three MLAs did not turn up. Saryu Roy, an independent MLA from Jamshedpur, remained neutral during the voting.
Hemant Soren resigned on January 31 after he was arrested on the charge of “possessing 12 adjacent parcels of land measuring 8.5 acres” in Ranchi using falsified deeds and tampered revenue records. Champai Soren, a senior JMM senior leader, took over as the leader of the legislative party, and was sworn in as CM on February 2 — it was his government that won the trust vote on Monday.
“[Jharkhand police constable Bhanu Pratap] Prasad was actively involved in hatching conspiracies with other persons to acquire and conceal various properties in an illegal manner including the properties which are illegally acquired and possessed by Hemant Soren,” the ED said in the documents it submitted in a Ranchi court February 1 to seek Hemant’s remand. The ED’s claims were based on details allegedly recovered from Prasad’s phone in June 2023, when he was arrested.
Hemant Soren refuted the ED charges saying that he would “quit politics” if the ED showed any evidence of the charges against him. “I challenge BJP to prove corruption charges against me. If proven, I will resign from politics. I was targeted because I am a tribal,” Hemant said on the floor of the Jharkhand assembly. He also claimed that the state governor CP Radhakrishnan was involved in his arrest. The Raj Bhavan did not respond to his accusations. He was granted special permission from the court to attend the floor test of the Champai Soren government.
Hemant Soren has been facing the danger of losing his post for almost two years now. In February 2022, the BJP moved a petition before the then governor Ramesh Bias to disqualify Soren as CM for renewing a mining lease in his own name, while he was in charge, terming it as a clear conflict of interest. Soren refuted the claim and after the hearing, the Election Commission of India submitted its recommendation to Bias in a sealed cover in August 2022. The former governor had not acted on the recommendation, but the EC refused to share its recommendation with Soren even through a Right to Information application.
The ED also began probing two cases against Soren. The first pertained to an illegal stone quarry in Sahibganj — Soren’s constituency representative Pankaj Mishra was arrested in this matter on July 19 that year. Soren was questioned in November 2022, and the ED registered a case that month. The second pertained to the land parcel case in which Soren was finally arrested last week.
Even as the ED probed Hemant Soren, he reached out to the voters, particularly the tribal population (JMM’s core voter base) through the Sarkar Aapke Dwar (government at your doorstep) programme of the Jharkhand government to speak about how the BJP was using Central agencies to target him.
“In almost every programme, he spoke about how the BJP, through Central government investigating agencies, was targeting and harassing him because he was a tribal, who was working for people’s welfare,” said Ranchi-based political and tribal expert Hemant Hembrom, adding that the former CM tried to garner sympathy from tribals for his alleged “witch-hunt”.
The tribal population constitutes about 30% of Jharkhand’s population and includes 4% Christian tribals. Another important vote bank in Jharkhand is Muslims, who constitute about 14.5% of the population, as per the 2011 census. Experts say the two communities were the reason for the JMM-led alliance winning the 2019 assembly election despite the pull of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The JMM victory forced the BJP to dump its former CM and non-tribal leader Raghubar Das, who is now Odisha's governor. The BJP got Babulal Marandi, the state’s first CM, to merge his Jharkhand Vikas Morcha with the BJP and made him state party president. According to Hembrom, the BJP learnt from its loss that it would not be possible to defeat the JMM with a non-tribal leader.
To counter the BJP, Hemant Soren played his tribal card smartly. He reinforced tribal identity in the state by making the 1931 domicile certificate a must for getting government jobs. He repeatedly called the BJP a party of Hindi-speaking people but described himself as a Ho-speaking Santali tribal. By not selecting his wife Kalpana Soren to replace him and opting for Champai, an old JMM leader, who championed the cause of a separate state from Bihar, Hemant Soren aimed to keep the party’s tribal vote bank intact and prevent the BJP from targeting him for nepotism.
Political experts say half of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Jharkhand have a considerable influence on tribal and Muslim voters. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, most of the tribals had voted for BJP, enabling it to win 12 seats with one seat each for JMM and Congress. Whether the tribal voters will vote for Hemant Soren or opt for PM Modi’s appeal will be known only after the Lok Sabha 2024 polls. Experts say JMM would be trying to earn maximum political mileage from Hemant Soren’s arrest and his Monday speech in the state assembly was also aimed at it.
Chetan Chauhan is National Affairs Editor. A journalist for over two decades, he has written extensively on the social sector and politics with a special focus on the environment and political economy.
