Hemant Versus Himanta

Himanta Biswa Sarma brings his hate bandwagon to Jharkhand to rattle Hemant Soren’s tribal identity politics

- Md Asghar Khan and Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

ASSAM Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, while addressing the media on November 4 in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, alleged: “Hemant Soren is a spokesperson of infiltrators.” By infiltrator, he meant Jharkhand’s Bengali-speaking Muslims, most of whom, if not all, he evidently holds as infiltrators from Bangladesh. This remark came three days after Sarma alleged that under Chief Minister Soren’s rule, Hindus were becoming ‘outsiders’ in Jharkhand. A couple of days before that, on October 29, Sarma alleged that Jharkhand’s Santhal Pargana region “is in line to become mini-Bangladesh”. He even compared himself with the Ramayan epic’s Lord Hanuman—well, almost—when he likened his ‘setting fire on infiltrators’ to Hanuman’s setting Lanka ablaze.

Sarma is an unusual challenger to Chief Minister and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader Soren. Jharkhand and Assam are about 500 km apart, share no border and have few socio-cultural and political similarities. Sarma was never involved in politics in Jharkhand, and no one perhaps ever expected or imagined an Assamese politician would turn into Jharkhand’s biggest polariser until the BJP, in June, made Sarma a co-in-charge of the party for the Jharkhand Assembly election.

Since then, he has eclipsed all Jharkhand BJP leaders, including former Chief Ministers Babulal Marandi and Arjun Munda, and even the BJP in-charge for the Jharkhand election, former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and current Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. As in every other place he goes, Sarma hogs the headlines.He has been entrusted with popularising a new brand of politics in Jharkhand—vilification of Bengali-speaking Muslims as ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’, a task in which he has excelled since joining the BJP in 2015—to challenge Soren’s tribal-oriented party.