SORENS IN A MINEFIELD

Jharkhand chief minister Hem­ ant Soren has some real fire­ fighting to do in the coming days if he wants to continue in his post. Everything seems to be going wrong at once.

- Amitabh Srivastava

On one flank looms an Election Commission notice asking him why he should not be disqualified for holding a mining lease from the government (an office of profit offence). On another, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on May 11 arrested state mining secretary Pooja Singhal, the officer he had handpicked in August 2021 to lead the department. The EC has given time till May 20 to Soren—who also holds the mining portfolio—to explain why he owns the lease, a violation of Section 9A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951.

The apparent coincidence—ED conducting raids on Singhal on May 6, just three days after the EC served Soren notice—has also spawned cons­ piracy theories in capital Ranchi that the central agencies are again at work to destabilise a duly elected govern­ment of the Opposition. The Soren­led Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) allia­nce government, with the Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal as partners, had come to power after defeating the BJP in the December 2019 state election.

Soren has described the raids as “empty threats” and accused the BJP­ led central government of trying to browbeat political opponents using state machinery. Jharkhand BJP presi­ dent Deepak Prakash countered this, saying it was a weird defence of the corrupt, considering the ED had seized over Rs 18 crore in cash from the house of chartered accountant Suman Kumar, who is allegedly linked to Singhal.

Singhal, a 2000 batch IAS offi­cer, has been arrested in an old case of money­laundering, and not in connec­tion with Soren’s current crisis. But as mining secretary, she must have known about Soren’s mining lease. Also, a number of serving mining officers are under the radar (in connection with the recovered cash), so the ED has possibly widened the investigation’s limits.