Dear readers,
A big thank you for reading Poll Vault and writing back with your comments. It has been more than two months since the Lok Sabha election results, and I am back now to once again discuss politics with you. Welcome to Power Play—I hope for your continued support with this newsletter as well.
I find, of course, that the game of power remains as uncertain as ever. Power is poison, Rahul Gandhi said in January 2013 in a Congress conclave in Jaipur when he was made the party vice president. “The Great Agnostic”, as the 19th-century American lawyer and writer Robert G. Ingersol was called, famously said that if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power.
Thus, many were surprised when former Jharkhand Chief Minister Champai Soren suddenly announced his decision to form a new political outfit this week. This came after his minutely dissected visit to New Delhi and an open-to-interpretation letter on X (formerly Twitter) in which he spoke of his disenchantment with parent party Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). Why surprised, you ask? Because both within and outside the party, people have known Champai to be a low-profile politician who was deeply loyal to the Shibu Soren family.
That the 67-year-old Champai, popularly known as Kolhan Tiger, who worked shoulder to shoulder with JMM patriarch Shibu Soren during the movement to establish Jharkhand, would rebel against his mentor’s party is something many are finding hard to digest.
Champai took oath as Chief Minister of Jharkhand on February 2 after the resignation of Hemant Soren just days before he was arrested in an Enforcement Directorate case. It was commonly understood that he had been installed in the Chief Minister’s chair as a faithful stand-in for Hemant until the latter was released from jail. As expected, his tryst with chief ministership was short-lived and he had to resign on July 3, days after Hemant came out on bail. Hemant took oath as Chief Minister on July 4 and Champai even took oath as his Minister on July 8.
All this suddenly changed on August 18. In a long tweet, Champai recalled how he was “humiliated” before being made to resign from the chief ministership and that he would keep all options open until the Assembly election.
Social media, which had earlier hailed Hemant Soren’s decision to quit the chair before being arrested and had condemned Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for remaining Chief Minister even while in jail, took no time to now find virtues in Kejriwal’s decision and to rue that Hemant Soren was taken for a ride. Soon, parallels were drawn between Champai Soren and Jitan Ram Manjhi of Bihar.
The mass wisdom now is that Hemant Soren would not have seen this day had he made his wife Kalpana Soren the Chief Minister when he went to jail. Insiders claim that Hemant indeed wanted to do this but there were differences within the Shibu Soren family that prevented it. At the time, the JMM took the high moral ground, lauding Hemant for not promoting his family.
A somewhat similar scenario played out in Bihar in 2014 when Nitish Kumar, taking responsibility for the Janata Dal (United)’s crushing defeat in that year’s Lok Sabha election, decided to anoint a Mahadalit candidate, Jitan Ram Manjhi, as Chief Minister. Months later, when Nitish wanted the chief ministership back, the till-now docile Manjhi hit back ferociously and gave up the chair only after a lot of bad blood and ugly scenes were exchanged in February 2015.
Champai Soren was Chief Minister for 153 days, Manjhi was in the chair for 278 days. Manjhi too, after being removed as Chief Minister, floated his own party Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) and is now a Union Minister in the Modi 3.0 government. Is Champai inspired by this?
Champai has claimed that he resigned from the chair when asked to since he had “no lust for power”. He also promised not to damage his parent party JMM or include any of its members in his new party. Principled politics, however, often seems an oxymoron; more so when it comes to handing over power in a crisis scenario.
A look at recent history shows that whenever Chief Ministers have had to resign due to some case or exigency, most of them choose to trust a family member rather than any senior party member. The intended objective was always to nip in the bud any possibility of a future rebellion and ensure that no parallel power structure emerges.
When the mantle of heirdom fell on Abhishek Banerjee in the Trinamool Congress or on Akash Anand in the Bahujan Samaj Party, the nephews, respectively, of Mamata Banerjee and Mayawati, similar voices of dissent were heard, but the leaders leaned on the dictum that blood is thicker than water.
Nitish Kumar’s friend-turned-foe Lalu Prasad, a hardcore and practical politician, similarly took no risk when he had to relinquish chief ministership in the wake of his imminent arrest in the fodder scam of July 1997. He chose his wife Rabri Devi, a total novice in politics, as his replacement and was vehemently criticised for it. While the plan was for Rabri to be a stop-gap Chief Minister until Lalu came back, the continuing cases ensured that Rabri remained Chief Minister for three whole terms between 1997 and 2005.
While Lalu did manage to avoid a Champai Soren scenario, many within his party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), minced no words in criticising him for placing the interests of family above party. The criticism continued as both his sons and daughters joined politics as well, and went on to contest Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. In fact, party loyalist Ram Kripal Yadav (called Lalu’s Hanuman) was driven to quit the RJD and join the BJP in 2014 after he was asked to vacate his Parliamentary seat for one of Lalu’s daughters.
Trying to keep power within the family is thus not always free of friction. As one saw in the Samajwadi Party in the run-up to the 2017 Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh between Mulayam Singh Yadav’s brother Shivpal Yadav and son Akhilesh Yadav. The bitter uncle-nephew feud threatened to split the party but the son had the last laugh. The two have now united although rumblings are occasionally heard.
Between 2014 and 2018, the succession war in Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam rose to a high pitch between M. Karunanidhi’s two sons Stalin and Alagiri. In 2014, Alagiri was expelled from the party. In 2021, he claimed that he had been betrayed by his younger brother Stalin and that the latter would never become Chief Minister. He was famously proven wrong.
One also recalls the fight for power in the N.T. Rama Rao family three decades ago, between NTR’s second wife Lakshmi Parvathi and NTR’s son-in-law (from his first wife) Chandrababu Naidu. Naidu staged a coup and became Chief Minister. Parvathi, much later, joined the YSR Congress. The bitterness continues. The Naidu government recently removed her as an honorary professor at Andhra University, a post she got during the YSR Congress regime.
Champai Soren’s revolt brings back all these memories. Such incidents have taken on a new colour after the BJP’s notorious Operation Lotus formula began in Karnataka in 2008. We saw it play out in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. In Haryana, the senior Congress leader Kiran Choudhry, who quit the party two months ago, has joined the BJP and is now contesting as its candidate in a Rajya Sabha byelection.
Only time will tell whether Champai’s sudden revolt indicates a repeat of the Maharashtra experiment or whether he will stick to his promise of not harming his parent party JMM by taking away its leaders. Will Hemant Soren be able to keep his flock together or will he become another Uddhav Thackeray is the question on everyone’s mind.
Either way, one thing is sure: Jharkhand, where instability in politics has been the norm since its inception, is in for a new spectacle.
Watch this space and tell us which way you think it will swing in Jharkhand.
Until my next newsletter,
Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline
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