THE SLUGFEST SEASON

On February 4, as Chief Minister Hemant Soren was celebrating his party Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)'s 51st Foundation Day in Dhanbad, Union home minister Amit Shah came down heavily on his government-calling it the "most corrupt in the country"-while addressing a public meeting just over 100 kilometres away at Deoghar district in the state's northeast.

- Amitabh Srivastava

This was Shah's second public meeting in the state in just a month. He had addressed the previous one in south Jharkhand's Chaibasa on January 7, where he had made a similar appeal for the ouster of the Soren-led coalition government. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) calls these public meetings vijay sankalp-or vow of victory-rallies. The Lok Sabha election may be well over a year away, but the party clearly feels it's time they started building momentum for it. The reason is obvious: despite mounting an all-out offensive against Soren through a combination of political and legal means, there are some hard yards left to be covered if the BJP wishes to repeat its 2019 feat, when its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had bagged 12 of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Jharkhand.