'Dishom Guru' Shibu Soren: The Jharkhand leader who carved out a Tribal homeland

New Delhi: After the Left parties withdrew support in protest against India’s signing of the Indo-US nuclear deal, the survival of the Manmohan Singh government, the UPA government, had to face a floor test. For the coalition government to survive, every single vote mattered, including five from the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM).

Just ahead of the no-trust motion, but the redoubtable Shibu Soren, the founder chief of JMM, and a key ally, went missing.

As the most resourceful Lutyens managers and central agencies scoured for clues and leads, Soren, with his four other MPs, remained incommunicado till he had settled his side of the bargain.

Just a day ahead of the vote, on a tip-off by a source, this reporter found Guruji lounging in a nondescript house behind Delhi Gole Market.

That was the legend of Shibu Soren- from Delhi to Dumka in Jharkhand’s Santhal Pargana. Guruji, who had mystical powers to appear and disappear at will. He was the Dishom-Guru, the undisputed leader of the tribals in mineral-rich south Bihar.

Soren passed away at a Delhi hospital on Monday morning at the age of 81 after a prolonged illness.

JMM was formed in the early 1970s after local outfits representing tribal interests, the Jharkhand Party, lost steam. Soren and his aides decided to capture the vacuum by seeking to offer an alternative political platform for the ‘exploited’ against the dikku.

JMM articulated its political agenda as one that sought to protect the interests of the tribals against the outsiders, symbolized by usurious moneylenders, the middlemen, and power brokers who benefited the most from rapid post-Independence industrialization and mining.

JMM would soon emerge as a powerful political force to reckon with in Santhal Pargana and the Chota Nagpur plateau. In 1991, the party sent six MPs to the Lok Sabha, including one from Odisha. It had more than a dozen MLAs in the legislative assembly of the undivided Bihar as it mounted a strident campaign for the creation of a separate.

By the mid-nineties, JMM under Shibu Soren had truly emerged as the party representing the interests of the Tribal population in central and eastern India.

And then the JMM bribery case happened. Soren and his associates were accused of taking money for voting in favour of a trust vote sought by the PV Narsimha Rao government.

In a 1998 verdict, the Supreme Court upheld the argument put forth by the JMM that its MPs enjoyed immunity under Article 105 (2) for their actions (that is, voting) inside the house. In 2024, the Supreme Court bench ruled against this interpretation of legislative immunity.

The JMM case sullied the image of the party. BJP, helped by RSS’s affiliates like Vanvasi Seva Kendra, made an aggressive pitch for the tribal votes. When Jharkhand was finally created in 2000, along with Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh, the BJP had the numbers to anoint Babula Marandi, a dyed-in-the-wool RSS man, as the first chief minister of the state.

In the faction-ridden and fractured polity of the state, Soren got multiple opportunities to lead the government, but he could never really sustain at the helm. He in fact lost a by-election after becoming the CM and had to subsequently resign.

Soren looked more comfortable in the opposition. He was cut out to lead agitations. He was the leader of the masses who walked barefoot, led protests, and someone who could take on the high and mighty in power. This reporter, following Sorne’s election campaign in Dumka, saw a breastfeeding mother dash towards the JMM leader to seek Guruji’s blessing for their child.

But Guruji somehow could never really make the transition from being a leader to an administrator. That task was left for his younger son, Hemant Soren, who, having won two consecutive elections for the JMM, has emerged as the undisputed leader of the Tribals in Jharkhand.