State of play inJharkhand polls

The manifesto for the assembly elections in Jharkhand promises the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), but makes an exception for tribals. The UCC, which proposes a common law, conflicts with community-specific laws including those protecting tribal rights and customs. The exception BJP has promised in UCC suggests the party is careful not to invite any pushback from the tribals, who constitute 26.2% of Jharkhand’s population.

This policy nuance by the BJP is influenced by the success of the JMM-Congress-RJD alliance that won the 2019 assembly election. Before 2019, the BJP sought to counter the dominant narrative of tribal assertion by consolidating the vote of non-tribal communities, especially the OBCs. This tactic succeeded in the 2014 assembly elections and the BJP formed the government with Raghubar Das, an OBC leader, at the helm.

A resurgent JMM and its pre-poll alliance with major non-BJP formations turned the tables in five years. In 2019, the JMM-led alliance won 25 of the 28 constituencies reserved for Scheduled Tribes (STs) in the 81-seat legislative assembly. The JMM, which traces its lineage to Adivasi mobilisations in erstwhile Bihar, has been aggressively championing its tribal identity while framing the BJP as an anti-tribal party. It has projected the arrest of chief minister Hemant Soren on corruption charges as evidence of the BJP’s “anti-tribal politics”. The JMM has also opposed UCC and promised the implementation of the Sarna code that claims a separate religious identity for the tribals.

Over-emphasis on any dominant identity can result in counter polarisation of disparate groups, which together may be a majority, as witnessed during the recent Haryana assembly election. Jharkhand, of course, is a more complicated polity with multiple narratives on identity influencing voting choices. The BJP has upended the tribal narrative on land alienation by claiming illegal migration from Bangladesh as the “real threat” to tribals and has promised the implementation of the National Register of Citizens against the JMM’s support for the Chota Nagpur Tenancy and Santhal Parganas Tenancy Acts. The BJP has also attempted to subsume the legacy of the tribal hero, Birsa Munda, within the nationalist movement rather than let the JMM appropriate it from the platform of tribal exceptionalism. On view in Jharkhand is a battle of narratives — one seeking to embrace the tribal identity within the rubric of Hindu nationalism and the other claiming distinct agency for tribals. Even matters of governance — welfare to public corruption — are being raised within this fold.

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