Late Thursday (June 4) evening, when the Congress party picked Pranav Jha as its candidate for the upcoming Rajya Sabha polls from Jharkhand, it knew the path to victory wasn’t easy.
What it hadn’t expected, perhaps, was just how quickly the hurdles would begin to appear and whence they’d come. Not even 24 hours had passed since the Congress declared Jha’s candidature when the first blow came from the party’s senior ally in the state, chief minister Hemant Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM).
After Soren presided over a meeting of his party’s MLAs at his official residence in Ranchi, the JMM said it was considering fielding candidates for both Rajya Sabha seats going to polls on June 18. For the INDIA Bloc, the timing could hardly be worse. Even as the alliance grapples with the DMK’s decision to stay away from a crucial meeting and mounting uncertainty within the Trinamool Congress, the Congress-JMM row has opened another fault line in the Opposition camp.
JMM wants to field both candidates
Senior ministers in the Jharkhand government, Hafizul Hassan and Sudivya Kumar, told reporters after meeting Soren that “JMM workers want the party to field candidates on both seats; a formal announcement about this will be made soon by the chief minister”.
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Though Soren is yet to announce his party’s Rajya Sabha candidates, JMM general secretary and spokesperson Supriyo Bhattacharya told The Federal“The last date for filing nominations is June 8, you will know the party’s decision before that”.
Bhattacharya added, “Two things are clear: first, JMM workers want us to field candidates for both seats and we respect the sentiments of our workers and, second, the Congress announced its candidate without consulting us; if they wanted to field this person (Jha), they should have spoken to Hemant Soren, they can’t decide unilaterally.”
The JMM upheld coalition dharma even when the RJD and the Congress did not offer us any seats in the alliance to contest the Bihar polls last year
While Jha could not be reached for comment, the party’s media wing chief, Pawan Khera, who is in the fray for one of the three Rajya Sabha seats the Congress hopes to win from Karnataka, told reporters in New Delhi, “We are going to win all seven seats (for which the party has fielded candidates); the Congress will win in Jharkhand”.
Congress convenes meeting
Late Friday evening, the Congress convened a meeting of its 16-member legislature party with the party’s state in-charge and key Rahul Gandhi aide, K Raju, present to take stock of the day’s development. Party sources told The Federal that Raju had sought time to meet Soren on Saturday to “resolve any differences” between the two parties though the chief minister’s office was yet to grant him an appointment.
The Congress had expected trouble for its Jharkhand candidate during the election but had not anticipated that the very first salvo would come from the JMM. Instead, they feared the polls could witness cross-voting by MLAs from the ruling coalition for a candidate ‘propped up by the BJP’.
Rumours that the BJP was encouraging Parimal Nathwani, business tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s aide and Director of Corporate Affairs at Reliance Industries Limited, to enter the poll fray from Jharkhand have been swirling in Jharkhand’s power corridors for weeks. Nathwani is currently a Rajya Sabha member from YS Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP representing Andhra Pradesh. His term ends on June 21. He has previously served two terms in the Upper House from Jharkhand as an independent backed by the BJP and the All Jharkhand Students Union.
Jha on sticky wicket?
Though Nathwani has not filed his nomination for the polls yet and the BJP too hasn’t declared any candidate from the state, Congress insiders say the threat of Jha’s defeat looms large; more so now given the JMM’s posturing.
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“Of the two seats going to polls, the first was a safe seat because the candidate requires 28 first preference votes to win and our alliance (JMM+Congress+CPI-ML+RJD) has 56 MLAs. We knew the second seat would be difficult if the BJP played its dirty tricks again because if 28 first preference votes were polled for the first seat, we would have exactly 28 first preference votes left for the second seat. The BJP and its allies have a total of 24 MLAs and need just four MLAs of our alliance to cross-vote for their candidate or for some of our votes to be declared invalid,” a senior Congress minister in the Soren cabinet told The Federal.
JMM raises an alarm
Interestingly, just 10 days back, it was the JMM that had first raised alarm over the possibility of cross-voting in the upcoming polls. In a letter to Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, dated May 25, Bhattacharya had pointed to a statement made by Babulal Marandi, Leader of Opposition in the Jharkhand Assembly, and claimed the BJP planned to “deploy massive financial allurements, intimidation or unethical pressures” to force MLAs of the ruling coalition to cross-vote in favour of a BJP-backed candidate.
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Bhattacharya claimed that despite the BJP lacking the numerical strength to win a Rajya Sabha seat from the state, Marandi had publicly said the party would field a candidate in the upcoming polls. Kumar offered no response to the “appeal to ensure a free and fair election”, Bhattacharya told The Federal.
What makes the upcoming contest most intriguing, though, is not that the ruling coalition anticipated a BJP ploy to encourage cross-voting or that the JMM’s appeal received no reply from the CEC but the contradictory claims being made now by allies, JMM and Congress, and what they could portend for the ruling coalition’s future.
Allies spar over seats
Bhattacharya claims that the Congress announced Jha as its candidate without the JMM’s nod even though Soren “was the senior partner in the alliance, on whose strength we formed the government in Jharkhand for two consecutive terms”.
“The JMM upheld coalition dharma even when the RJD and the Congress did not offer us any seats in the alliance to contest the Bihar polls last year,” Bhattacharya added.
The Congress, however, differs. “How can they say we did not discuss the Rajya Sabha polls with them? The Congress president spoke to Hemant Soren and so did Rahul Gandhi. Jha is an AICC secretary attached to the office of the Congress president. Would we have announced his candidature from Jharkhand without consulting with our senior alliance partner? I do not know why the JMM is suddenly singing a different tune; is this a pressure tactic to just get the second seat for JMM or is Hemant Soren doing this under some political pressure from the BJP,” the senior Congress minister quoted earlier told The Federal while claiming that “the party will respond officially on the matter if the JMM indeed decides to field candidates on both seats”.
A Jharkhand Congress leader conceded that “ties with the JMM had been under strain for months” and claimed that “except at cabinet meetings, the chief minister has not been communicating with Congress ministers; communication between the (Congress) party and the JMM leadership has practically broken down and we have been alerting the high command that things are not going well in the alliance.”
That the JMM has chosen to spring this surprise now should also worry the Congress leadership for reasons beyond the Rajya Sabha polls.
Another blow to INDIA Bloc?
The visible strain in ties between the two allies comes just ahead of the June 8 meeting of the INDIA bloc and at a time when the Opposition coalition has already lost a crucial constituent, former Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin’s DMK, while another dominant player, former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, is imploding under the threat of a seemingly inevitable split.
The DMK has already announced its decision to skip the June 8 INDIA bloc meeting. With June 8 also being the last date for filing nominations for the Rajya Sabha polls and strains between the Congress and JMM now out in the open, it remains to be seen whether the Congress can salvage its rocky Jharkhand alliance merely by withdrawing Jha from the Rajya Sabha contest, if Hemant Soren decides to chart his own independent course, or worse, drifts towards the BJP-led NDA coalition.
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