With campaigning for the Jharkhand election in its final leg, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ruling INDIA bloc led by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), are locked in a debate on the State’s Adivasi identity. The BJP’s sharp focus has been on the rhetoric of “Bangladeshi infiltration”, which it is linking not only to the State’s demographic changes but also to crimes against tribal women, land alienation, and what some Adivasi communities perceive as a gradual dilution of their indigenous cultural practices. The party accuses the JMM-Congress-RJD alliance of encouraging “infiltrators” to bolster the alliance’s voter base. This campaign has been running alongside the BJP’s efforts to stress the importance of unity among SC, ST and OBC groups using the messaging of “ek hai to safe hai (safe when united”), suggesting that the BJP’s campaign is targeted at having a coalition with more place for Adivasis alongside the party’s existing base of non-Adivasi Hindu voters. Amidst the blitz of campaign speeches by the BJP’s star campaigners, the ruling alliance’s campaign led by Chief Minister Hemant Soren and his wife Kalpana Soren, has squarely put the onus of checking alleged “infiltrators” on the Centre, without explicitly negating the claim of the BJP. The INDIA campaign also tries to drive home the point that as Jharkhand has no international borders, the onus of checking alleged infiltrators should be on the Union, where the BJP is in power.
Another central theme in the INDIA bloc’s campaign strategy has been the promise of implementing land registries as they had been surveyed in 1932 for the purpose of determining domicile. But the JMM and its allies are careful here too, as Jharkhand has had a history of settlement with migration from neighbouring States in waves ever since. Some senior BJP leaders have suggested a National Register of Citizens in the State, though the party does not mention this in its manifesto. The BJP is talking up charges of corruption that sent leaders such as Mr. Soren and the Congress’s Alamgir Alam to jail. The JMM has been questioning the announcement of the election in the State a month before the term of the current Assembly ends, calling it as a BJP ploy to disrupt the welfare schemes of the Soren government. While the BJP is going all out to attack the popularity of these schemes by questioning their implementation at the fag end of the alliance government’s term, its manifesto has tried to outdo the JMM’s in terms of sops being promised for the youth, women and farmers in the State.