WOOING THE TRIBALS

TRIBAL COMMUNITIES ARE BECOMING AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT POLITICAL DEMOGRAPHIC—A TREND ESPECIALLY VISIBLE IN MADHYA PRADESH

- RAHUL NORONHA

Over the past three weeks, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s busy tour schedule has shown an enduring theme: an outreach to tribal communities. From promoting existing government schemes to announcing new ones, as well as more obvious attempts to appear ‘tribal friendly’—such as an announcement that November 15, the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, a freedom fighter from the Munda tribe, would henceforth be celebrated as ‘tribal pride day’—Chouhan’s outreach makes it clear that this demographic has become increasingly important to the saffron party’s political calculations.

While there are many explanations for this pro-tribal blitz, one data point is particularly revealing. In the state’s 14th Vidhan Sabha election in 2013, the BJP had won 31 of the 47 seats reserved for scheduled tribes (STs). In the following election in 2018, the Congress had won 30 of the 47. More pertinently, it was the defection of Jyotiraditya Scindia and his loyalists that replaced the Congress’s Kamal Nath government with the BJP’s Shivraj Singh Chouhan administration, not an electoral victory. Highlighting the BJP’s political weakness among tribal communities in the state is the fact that of the 25 Congress MLAs who defected to the BJP, only two held ST seats; 13 held general seats while eight held scheduled caste seats.