Jharkhand voted for its sixth Vidhan Sabha on 13 and 20 November. The election year came at the end of a decade of relative stability in a state that had seen nine different governments being formed in its first fourteen years. That calm was shattered on 31 January, when the chief minister, Hemant Soren, resigned hours before being arrested on corruption charges. His resignation averted a constitutional crisis similar to the one seen in Delhi shortly after, when the sitting chief minister was incarcerated for five months, but his arrest and subsequent release, in July, had political ramifications. Much like Jitan Ram Manjhi in neighbouring Bihar, a decade earlier, Hemant’s interim replacement, Champai Soren, responded to his predecessor’s return by defecting to the Bharatiya Janata Party shortly before an assembly election.
While the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha portrayed its leader’s incarceration as a slight on Adivasi honour, the BJP has accused Soren of running a corrupt government that has failed to bring development. Adivasis, who make up over a quarter of the state’s population, are crucial to putting together a winning coalition, and the BJP has attempted a number of strategies to woo them away from the JMM, including a campaign of blatant Islamophobia that attracted censure from the Election Commission. The party’s key strength, however, lies in its ability to consolidate non-Adivasi votes—particularly Other Backward Classes, who make up half the population.
The Jharkhand assembly has 81 seats, with 28 of them reserved for Scheduled Tribes and nine for Scheduled Castes. For the purposes of this analysis, they have been divided into five electoral regions, corresponding to the state’s administrative divisions. Adivasis, who make up a majority of the electorate in over twenty constituencies, are mostly concentrated in Kolhan (the historical Singhbhum district, which includes Jamshedpur) and the Santal Parganas (along the West Bengal border), as well as in a large swathe of South Chotanagpur around the state capital, Ranchi. North Chotanagpur is the most industrialised part of the state, including the coal belt around Dhanbad and the Bokaro steel plant, with a diverse population, while Palamu includes three of the country’s most underdeveloped districts, with Dalits making up a quarter of the population.
Electoral History
During the colonial era, the mineral-rich Chotanagpur Plateau and Santal Parganas, for which the name Jharkhand was first used in 1938, were part of the Bengal Presidency, before the Bihar and Orissa divisions were combined into a province, in 1912. When the province was further partitioned, in 1936, they became part of Bihar. Following Independence, the region was allocated around a quarter of the state’s seats in the union and state legislatures, and the Jharkhand Party, born out of a statehood movement spearheaded by the Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Mahasabha, emerged as the second-largest party in the first two assembly elections. Its leader, Jaipal Singh Munda, was able to wield some influence in national politics but failed to achieve statehood, as the States Reorganisation Committee restricted itself to linguistic, rather than cultural, claims. Facing diminishing electoral returns, Jaipal merged the Jharkhand Party with the Congress. The region became a bulwark for Congress support even as the party lost ground to the socialists in the rest of Bihar.
The end of the Jharkhand Party fragmented the statehood movement, with a number of organisations emerging to claim its mantle. One of these was the JMM, founded in 1973 by Binod Bihari Mahato and Shibu Soren, with the support of AK Roy, whose Marxist Coordination Centre was active in the coal mines around Dhanbad. The JMM kept the statehood demand alive but was unable to keep together its electoral coalition of Mahatos and Adivasis. During the 1980s, the Mahato community—most of whom are Kurmis, and classified as Other Backward Classes in the state—shifted its support to the All Jharkhand Students Union, founded by younger JMM cadre disillusioned by Soren’s proximity to the Congress.
It was the BJP that was able to eventually supplant the Congress in Jharkhand, in the aftermath of the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. After it came to power at the centre, the party passed the Bihar Reorganisation Act, 2000, which created the state. Despite having lost the Bihar assembly election earlier that year, it had won enough of the region’s 81 seats to form a minority government under Babulal Marandi once the new assembly was seated.
In 2003, Marandi, a Santal who had been an RSS worker for his entire adult life, was forced to make way for Arjun Munda, a defector from the JMM. Party infighting contributed to losses in the 2004 general election, and the state was governed by a series of unstable coalitions, with periods of president’s rule, over the next decade. It was only in 2014 that the BJP was able to secure an unequivocal mandate, winning 12 of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the general election and a Vidhan Sabha majority, in alliance with the AJSU Party.
The Sangh’s decades of work Hinduising tribal communities through the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, as well as the BJP’s Adivasi leadership in the state, had helped the NDA make inroads in the JMM’s traditional strongholds of Kolhan, where Adivasis form a majority, and the Santal Parganas. In 2009, it had won six seats in Kolhan and two in the Santal Parganas. The collapse of the Congress and inclusion of the AJSU Party in the NDA in 2014 meant that non-Adivasi votes coalesced around the BJP. Meanwhile, according to a post-election survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, the BJP narrowly edged out the JMM among Adivasi voters as well, with 49 percent of Adivasis who consider themselves Hindus voting for the former, and 44 percent of Christian Adivasis supporting the latter.
Moreover, the failure of the Mahagathbandhan, the grand alliance of the Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata Dal (United), to come to an agreement with the JMM meant that the field was fragmented—the effective number of parties, or ENOP, a measure of how the vote is dispersed in an election, was 5.07—which reduced the threshold for victory. As a result, the NDA won 42 seats in the assembly election with just 35.1 percent of the vote. Most of its gains were concentrated in North and South Chotanagpur, where it won 25 out of the 40 total seats with a vote share of 37.4 percent. It again won six Kolhan seats and improved its tally in the Santal Parganas from two to seven. The BJP was restricted to 25.3 percent in Palamu, but still won four of the nine seats. Raghubar Das, a trade unionist and BJP veteran from the OBC Teli community, was named the state’s first non-Adivasi chief minister.
With the NDA’s gains mostly coming at the expense of the Mahagathbandhan, the JMM actually gained a seat, winning 19 in total, with a fifth of the vote. Shibu Soren’s son, Hemant, who had been chief minister for the seventeen months before the election, became leader of the opposition. In 2016, the state government introduced amendments to tenancy legislation, enabling the transfer and commercial use of Adivasi land. The decision revived the Pathalgadi movement—named after the practice of Adivasi villages erecting stone signs that asserted their land rights and prohibited the entry of outsiders—which resulted in heavy state repression, with the government bringing sedition charges against ten thousand people in a single district.
Hemant was instrumental in pressuring the government to withdraw the amendments, which it did, in August 2017, after the governor at the time, the future president Droupadi Murmu, withheld her assent. The following year, the JMM joined the Mahagathbandhan, which now included the Congress, the RJD and Marandi’s Jharkhand Vikas Party (Pragatisheel). The alliance won just two seats in the Modi wave during the 2019 general election, leading to the JVM(P) breaking away. However, the assembly election that December told a different story.
This time, it was the BJP’s house that was divided, with seat-sharing talks with the AJSU Party breaking down at the eleventh hour. The AJSU Party put up 53 candidates, who won only two seats but received more votes than the margin of victory in 14 of the 47 seats won by the Mahagathbandhan. The BJP lost an average of six percentage points in those seats but improved its overall vote share by two points, as a result of contesting seven additional seats. It gained eight seats from other parties but lost 22 of its own, ending up with 25. Raghubar Das lost his Jamshedpur East seat, which he had held since 1995, to his former cabinet colleague Saryu Roy, who had run as an independent.
Adivasi anger over the attempted tenancy reforms resulted in the JMM winning 20 of the 23 seats it contested in Kolhan and the Santal Parganas. The BJP’s tally among seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes fell from 11 to two. The departure of the AJSU Party helped erode the BJP’s gains from the previous election in North and South Chotanagpur, where the party was reduced to 16 seats in all. On average, the BJP lost 1.5 points in the 63 seats it contested in these four regions during both elections. In Palamu, however, it improved its vote share by over nine points and increased its seat tally by one.
The Mahagathbandhan improved upon its cumulative 2014 vote share in each constituency by an average of 1.5 points. The Congress was the biggest beneficiary of the alliance, gaining an average of almost fifteen points in the constituencies it had contested in both elections, as opposed to six points for the JMM and nine for the RJD. While the JMM won seventy percent of the seats it contested, the Congress had a strike rate of slightly over half.
Hemant Soren was arrested three months before the 2024 general election. His wife, Kalpana, campaigned in his stead. With an ENOP of 2.63, the general election was polarised between the NDA and the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance. Marandi had merged the JVM(P) with the BJP, while the AJSU Party, the JD(U) and the LJP had all resumed their alliances with the saffron party. The two largest Left parties in the state, the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) (Liberation) and the Marxist Coordination Centre, had also merged and joined the INDIA—which also included the Congress, the JMM and the RJD—but they had a significant presence in only four of the 81 assembly segments. The lone CPI(M–L)(L) candidate, Vinod Kumar Yadav, lost the Kodarma seat by almost four hundred thousand votes to the union minister Annapurna Devi.
Despite losing ground in the northern part of the country and failing to win a parliamentary majority on its own, the consolidation of its allies helped the BJP limit its losses in Jharkhand. It won eight seats, down from 11 in 2019, while Chandra Prakash Choudhary of the AJSU Party retained his Giridih seat. The NDA won 47.6 percent of the vote, about equal to what its constituent parties had cumulatively received in the 2019 assembly election, and led in 50 assembly constituencies. The INDIA, which won all five Lok Sabha seats reserved for STs, led in just 29 assembly segments, despite slightly improving its overall vote share to 39 percent.
The NDA was strongest in Palamu and North Chotanagpur, leading in 30 of the 34 assembly constituencies in the two regions with a simple majority of the vote. It also led the INDIA by over four points in Kolhan, where BJP candidates were ahead in eight of the 14 assembly constituencies. The NDA lost nine points in South Chotanagpur and five in the Santal Parganas, which accounted for 21 of the 29 INDIA leads.
The only significant non-aligned force in the election were eight independent candidates from the Jharkhandi Bhasha Khatiyan Sangharsh Samiti. Led by Jairam Mahato, the JBKSS had been formed, two years earlier, to advocate for the Jharkhandi language and for a domicile policy based on the final land survey conducted by the colonial authorities, in 1932, in order to address the dominance of outsiders. Mahato finished second in Giridih, receiving over three hundred and forty thousand votes and leading in two assembly segments. The JBKSS-aligned independents received over ten percent of the vote in North Chotanagpur. In five of the 22 INDIA-held assembly constituencies where the NDA led, they were the only minor candidate to receive more votes than the margin.
Contenders
In state after state during the Modi years, the BJP has generally overperformed in Lok Sabha elections, making gains that it cannot entirely replicate when the Vidhan Sabha is up for grabs. In 2019, according to the CSDS, seventeen percent of BJP voters in the general election voted for the Mahagathbandhan in the assembly election, while only three percent of Mahagathbandhan voters went the other way. Still, the NDA’s performance in the 2024 general election reflects the strength of its social base and the scale of the challenge facing Hemant Soren’s re-election campaign. The ruling coalition is defending margins of less than ten points in 20 of its 48 seats. The NDA led in 14 of these during this year’s general election—enough to swing the balance of power if its support base holds together in the assembly polls.
Conscious of the importance of its allies, the BJP is only contesting 68 seats this time, having ceded ten to the AJSU Party, two to the JD(U) and one to the LJP. Both the AJSU Party and JD(U) have Kurmi leaderships, and OBCs remain the bedrock of the NDA’s social coalition. Along with the upper castes and migrants from Bihar, they are key to the BJP reversing its 2019 decline in urban and semi-urban constituencies.
However, the party has indicated that it would install an Adivasi chief minister if it wins, having sent Raghubar Das to Odisha as governor and appointing Babulal Marandi its state president. The defections of Hemant’s sister-in-law Sita and Champai Soren, who complained about being disrespected when Hemant returned as chief minister, have added to the party’s Adivasi faces. Geeta Koda, the wife of the former chief minister Madhu Koda, also defected from the Congress earlier this year. By nominating Marandi and Sita Soren in unreserved constituencies, the NDA has put up 30 Adivasi candidates.
Besides offering political representation, the BJP has also changed its approach to wooing Adivasis, pragmatically shedding some of its ideological shibboleths. It has offered to exclude them from a future uniform civil code and been muted in its demonisation of Christians. Instead, it has scapegoated the numerically smaller Muslim community by raising the bogey of what it calls “land jihad.” Spearheaded by the chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, who has successfully spread similar conspiracy theories in his own state, the campaign—including election rallies by, among others, Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and the BJP president, JP Nadda—accuses infiltrators from Bangladesh are taking over Adivasi land. The party has not provided much concrete evidence to support this claim, instead focussing on a land dispute between two families that both have records proving they have lived in the region since at least 1932.
The JMM has responded by pointing out that Jharkhand does not share a border with Bangladesh and that such large-scale infiltration would, therefore, be the fault of the Modi government. The party is contesting 43 constituencies, including 20 of the 28 seats reserved for STs. It has touted its record standing for Adivasi and Jharkhandi rights. Hemant’s first act in office was to drop all charges against the Pathalgadi protesters. His government passed a resolution demanding that the indigenous faith of Sarnaism be recorded as a separate religion in the 2021 census, which has been indefinitely delayed. Ensuring the resolution’s implementation is one of the INDIA’s seven guarantees for the election. However, even though Sangh organisations have long insisted that the Sarna faith is part of Hinduism, Sarma has said that the BJP would implement the resolution if it were returned to power.
Another INDIA guarantee envisions a domicile policy based on the 1932 survey. Weeks before his arrest, Hemant had pushed through a bill in the assembly providing for this, overriding the governor’s repeated requests to reconsider. The proposal has broad support among both Adivasis and OBCs, having been one of the primary demands of the JBKSS—which has since changed its name to the Jharkhand Loktantrik Krantikari Manch and is contesting almost all the seats in the assembly election. The INDIA has also promised to expand reservations in government jobs and education to 77 percent, along with a caste census, the creation of a backward-classes commission and the identification of Extremely Backward Classes.
It remains to be seen whether these promises, and the various welfare schemes the state government has introduced, helps the alliance remain in power, but the Congress’s performance will be crucial to the outcome. The party is defending 16 seats, 11 of which it gained from other parties in the last election, and challenging in 14 others. It has been criticised for a shambolic campaign, with little presence on the ground, a party organisation in disarray, its two seniormost leaders addressing only 11 rallies between them and a manifesto that was released a day before the first phase of voting—in violation of the model code of conduct, which prohibits campaigning on that day. In the general election, the Congress swept the Adivasi belt of South Chotanagpur but trailed in all the unreserved assembly segments it contested except Madhupur, which is held by the JMM, and Mahagama, where it led by just 121 votes. (Both constituencies are located in the Santal Parganas.) This does not bode well for a party that is primarily responsible for winning over non-Adivasi voters to the INDIA.