DUMKA: A sleepy town in the tribal heartland of
Santhal Pargana
,
Dumka
first drew everybody’s attention in Oct 1990 when
Lalu Prasad Yadav
, the then CM of undivided Bihar, placed BJP leader L K Advani under arrest at a Bihar govt guest house in Massanjore at the site of a dam on the banks of the Mayurakshi after halting his Ram Rath Yatra in Samastipur.
Around the same time,
JMM
patriarch
Shibu Soren
had just been re-elected to Parliament from Dumka, a reserved seat for tribals, and was spearheading a movement against Lalu’s govt for a separate state of Jharkhand comprising tribal-dominated areas of south Bihar.
Cut to May 2024, Hemant and Tejashwi, sons of Shibu and Lalu respectively, have joined hands as INDIA bloc partners to take on BJP in the ongoing Lok Sabha polls.
However, the alliance suffered a setback just three days after the Lok Sabha polls were announced when
Sita Soren
, Shibu’s eldest bahu, abandoned ship and crossed over to BJP.
Sita also resigned as the JMM MLA from the Jama seat. Soon after, BJP announced her candidature from the Dumka seat recalling its earlier nominee, sitting MP Sunil Soren, who had defeated Shibu in the 2019 general election by nearly 50,000 votes. Sita has been quite vocal in criticising her late husband’s family and JMM.
Campaigning in Dumka, which will vote on June 1, has been hectic. Sita has been holding door-to-door campaigns and conducting public meetings in the villages.
Addressing the crowds, mostly poor tribal men, women, and children, in Santhali, she said: “The Jharkhand that you see today is a result of Guru ji (Shibu) and the vision of the late PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Even though Modiji built Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, like in Ramayana, this Sita was sent to vanvas (exile) for 14 years by her own family after the death of her husband.”
Dumka is known as a JMM bastion. Party president Shibu has won the seat eight times since 1980 and lost four times (1984, 1998, 1999 and 2019). Although considered an impregnable fortress, BJP has breached it several times in the past, the last being in 2019 when Sunil beat Shibu.
Now, with former chief minister
Hemant Soren
behind bars since Jan 31 after his arrest in a land scam case, Shibu’s pocket borough faces threat from his own daughter in-law. Two months after her “devar” (younger brother-in law) was arrested, Sita switched to BJP citing continuous neglect by the Soren family.
In her public discourse, Sita has often said, “Hemant has not seen struggles in his life. It was baba (Shibu) and my husband (Durga) who fought for a separate state and endured hardship. All he knows is kursi (chair) and AC (airconditioner). A member of the family (referring to Kalpana Soren) is going around the state giving slogans like ‘Jail ka tala tutega, Hemant Soren chhutega’. How does she intend to break the lock? Can anyone arrest a CM, who is the most powerful person in a state, without evidence?”
Sita’s late husband Durga was groomed by Shibu as his political successor. With Durga’s sudden death in 2009, Hemant, the third among Shi bu’s four children, was thrust into the political arena.
“I had no intention of joining politics. I wanted to become an architect but had to drop out (of BIT Mesra) as the central agencies were harassing my family. Then, I wanted to be a businessman, but bhaiya’s death and father’s illness changed everything,” Hemant had told TOI in an interview in 2019.
Sita was elected MLA from Jama, Durga’s old constituency, thrice (2009, 2014 and 2019) but was not inducted into the cabinet by Hemant even though he was the chief minister twice (2013-14 and 2019-2024). The 52-year-old was even ignored when Champai, a Shibu loyalist, took oath in Feb this year following Hemant’s arrest. Basant, a first-time MLA (from Dumka) and Shibu’s youngest son, was made transport minister.
Interestingly, there were rumours that Sita switched to BJP following pressure to do so. With Supreme Court ruling in March this year that MPs and MLAs were not immune to prosecution for accepting bribes for votes or making a speech in the House in a particular fashion, it became clear that Sita, who is facing a horse-trading case in a CBI court in Ranchi, would face trial.
Dismissing the rumours, Sita, claimed, “The case has been going on for many years now. Had that been the reason, I would have been in BJP much earlier. I joined BJP because I was not being respected in my party.”
For BJP, which is fighting Lok Sabha elections in Jharkhand on the corruption plank (with focus on the arrest of Hemant, Congress minister Alamgir Alam and senior IAS officers in separate money laundering and illegal mining cases), Sita’s attacks could further dent the JMM-led INDIA bloc’s image in the tribal heartland of Santhal Pargana division, where JMM and Congress won 16 out of 18 seats in the 2019 assembly polls.
On the law and order front, Dumka doesn’t have a good record with news of crimes, particularly against women and children, often hitting headlines.
A Spanish woman who was on a global bike tour with her husband was gang-raped in Dumka. It was also where a Class 12 student was set on fire by her stalker and his accomplice while she was asleep. She died of burn injuries days later, in Aug 2022. BJP, which has been accusing the JMM-led coalition govt of turning a blind eye to illegal immigration from Bangladesh, had then accused the govt of appeasing minorities.
“In Dumka, Shibu is respected across party lines. BJP does not speak ill of him, given his political stature and popularity among the tribals,” said Ramesh Mandal, a BJP worker from Nala in Jamtara district. “Yes, it is true that Sita broke away from the family, but BJP supporters do not look at the candidate. They only look at the symbol and PM Modi,” he added.
Nalin Soren, a seven-time JMM MLA and Sita’s opponent, calls her “bahu”. “She is my daughter-in-law, too. I haven’t spoken to her since she left JMM but until the polls are over, she is my opponent. She talks about neglect, but it was the family that made her MLA thrice from Jama after her husband’s death. It was the party that made her win, not her charisma,” he added.
English (US) ·