What were the voters thinking?! A rant.

I felt I had to say this out loud too many times during this election campaign. I held back for the sake of projecting objectivity. Now that the last vote has been counted, here's a rant that has been building up inside me:

I really wish some of those who won in Jharkhand yesterday had lost. I also wish some others won.

Those seven with alleged links to various left wing extremist organisations should not have won: Anosh Ekka (Kolebira), Ganesh Ganjhu (Simariya), Paulus Surin (Torpa), Nirmala Devi (Barkagaon), Prakash Ram (Latehar), Jagarnath Mahato (Dumri) and Jai Prakash Bhai Patel (Mandu).

I have written about them extensively elsewhere, but four worry me particularly. I am saddened that Anosh Ekka, already facing corruption charges and now in jail for murder, could win without even being present to campaign. I am angry at Babulal Marandi for propping up Ganesh Ganjhu, brother of TSPC supremo Brajesh Ganjhu. I am worried for the people of Torpa: Paulus Surin won with the lowest margin in the state because the PLFI opposed him throughout. Now that he has won, expect Surin to fight back. By extension, I am angry that Hemant Soren continued to support him. The Congress gave a ticket to Nirmala Devi, wife of former minister Yogendra Saw, in jail for allegedly starting two criminal gangs.

Dulu Mahto and Sanjeev Singh, who allegedly control the coal business in Dhanbad, won. There is an M-word to describe them. The alternative to Sanjeev Singh was of course Niraj Singh, his cousin who also has interests in coal, but at least he is better educated.

The people of Bhawanathpur voted for Bhanu Pratap Shahi, a former minister in the Madhu Kora government - like Anosh Ekka - who is facing multiple cases of corruption and disproportionate assets.

I have no idea why Sita Soren deserved to win from Jama. She was absconding for over a year in an assault case originating from the 2012 Rajya Sabha horse trading scam. Investigators say she was the one responsible for distributing money to legislators.

Nalin Soren has consistently failed to deliver in Shikaripara; he was also absconding for months in relation to a corruption case. This is the fifth consecutive time that he has won - he had no reason doing so.

Gita Kora will always be known as former chief minister Madhu Kora's wife, but people of Jaganathpur told me she was a better leader and legislator than Kora. Frankly, I am ambiguous about her win.

I am also happy that a few people did not win. The Jharkhand Party candidates in Torpa and Simdega - the latter was Anosh Ekka's wife - did not succeed. The PLFI was supporting them; their win would have meant a critical mass for the organisation.

I am happy Mahadev Ravinath Pahan did not win from Tamar. He is a cousin of CPI-Maoist leader Kundan Pahan and a win would have meant a fresh round of violence in the region.

I am grateful the voters of Ghatsila did not back Pradeep Balmuchu. He had nominated his 26-year-old daughter from the seat after ensuring the Congress's alliance with JMM ended. His selfishness was a major reason why the Congress went from 14 seats in 2009 to six now.

I am still searching for credible explanations as to why the BJP nominated Seema Sharma from Hatia at all. It was an insult to its cadres and voters - the party thought it could bring on an unknown face an win merely by riding the Modi wave.

I am happy that three individuals won - Pradip Yadav from Poreyahat, Arup Chatterjee from Nirsa and Raj Kumar Yadav from Dhanwar. Pradip Yadav was one of the most active legislators in the outgoing legislative assembly, raising a number of vital issues. I believe the outlooks of Arup Chatterjee and Rajkumar Yadav - from Left parties - will be vital during debates in the House.

Lois Marandi's win from Dumka is also important. It teaches the JMM to not be careless about its constituencies. Marandi is highly educated; her identity as a adivasi Christian makes her the only representative from a religious minority community within the BJP's 38 legislators.

I wish three individuals won. Arjun Munda would have been an important adivasi voice in the BJP; without him, the state unit of the party is vulnerable to a takeover from Delhi.

Sudesh Mahto's loss from Silli is a major setback. He had undertaken a large number of infrastructural and social projects in the region. I considered him to be the legislator who had done the most work during the last tenure. There are many arguments against him - allegations of corruption, use of alcohol and money to lure youngsters - but I believe Mahto should have been given one more term. His cadre strength in the region was one reason why the Maoists avoided Silli; it could change now. The eventual winner may give Kerala's Freakerz a run for their money, though.

I also think the CPI-ML's Vinod Singh deserved to win. He was a good legislator - always asking the right questions during assembly debates and taking principled stand on issues. The few interactions I have had with him told me he is a good man and a capable leader, too. He would have been an asset to the House.

The politically correct thing to say is that the voters decided whom to send to the assembly in their collective wisdom. If you have managed to read this far, you would know that I think that is bullshit.

Scramble for wins polarise Jharkhand further

This was published, edited, here.

Though it more than doubled its seat tally when compared to the 2009 assembly elections - 18 to 37 - the BJP has ended up not being satisfied with its performance in Jharkhand.

The BJP's final tally of 37 is unprecedented: the highest number of seats any party in the state held was when the BJP had the 32 it took away from the Bihar assembly on creation of Jharkhand in November, 2000. This time, the BJP has managed to have a footprint across the state - unlike the JMM, confined mostly to the East and South with no presence in Palamu - thus claiming a certain moral right to rule Jharkhand.

However, the NDA's numbers are lower than what major exit polls predicted: from 43-51 for the BJP alone to 61 in all with the BJP's alliance with the AJSU Party and LJP. At the end of the day, the BJP-AJSU alliance has just one seat more than what is required for a majority in the 81-member House.

So, where did the BJP's calculations go wrong? It looks like the party underestimated the JMM's understanding of Jharkhand. To put it more bluntly, the BJP did not understand the adivasis as the JMM does.

Of the 28 ST-reserved seats in the state, the BJP has won 11. This only an increase of two over the number it won in 2009. On the other hand, the JMM has managed to win 13 this time; it had only won 10 in 2009. The JMM's total number of seats went up by only one from 2009, to 19 now.

What this essentially means is that the JMM is more of an adivasi party now. The JMM lost three seats in the Santhal Pargana region but made sure it won the same number of ST-reserved seats there as it had won in 2009. It made significant inroads into its former stronghold of Kolhan - the heart of the statehood movement - by winning two ST seats more than in 2009.

The JMM's return to Kolhan is what seems to have damaged the BJP the most - it lost two potential CM candidates in the process in Arjun Munda and Chaibasa candidate J.B. Tubid, former state Home Secretary. The JMM surrendered its Ghatsila seat, but reclaimed Manoharpur, Majhgaon and Chakradharpur from the BJP - all ST seats.

The BJP may have increased its tally in the Santhal Pargana from two to seven, but only two of its seats are ST-reserved. This is still a major achievement - but it also means that the state as a whole seems to have been divided along the adivasi/ non-adivasi polarities: the Congress has failed to win a single ST seat despite actively wooing the adivasis. The result is that the number of ST seats won by anyone other than JMM or BJP has dropped from nine to four this election.

The BJP's major gains seems to have come from the weakening of the Congress (14 to six), RJD (five to zero) and the JVM-P (11 to 8). The BJP was counting on the JVM to do worse; Marandi has hurt the BJP by clawing back from the abyss. However, the overall weakening of the JVM would have done the BJP a world of good - the former had the highest vote share in 2009, at 28.4 per cent. The BJP now has 31.3 per cent; the JMM, 20.5 per cent.

No Independent has won the election this time, but the BJP lost five seats to regional partie; in a sign of what could have been, the BJP's candidates came second in 28 constituencies. With the help of some smart caste arthmetic, the BSP managed to win Hussainabad. At Jaganathpur, the party could not overcome Madhu Kora's popularity combined with his wife's image as an accessible politician. The party could not win in Kolebira despite Jharkhand Party leader Anosh Ekka is in jail on murder charges. At Bhawanathpur, Bhanu Pratap Shahi had canvassed for votes claiming he would go over to the BJP if he won.

The BJP seems to have got its strategy of Muslim polarisation only partially right. Despite facing a tough contest, it managed to retain Rajmahal, which has a significant number of Muslim voters. At Pakur, Madhupur and Jamtara, the BJP hoped the presence of multiple Muslim candidates or Muslim-favoured parties would help its cause, but it was successful only in Madhupur. At Torpa, which has a large number of Christian voters, the BJP hoped its Hindu candidate would win; the JMM retained the seat.

What this election has exposed is the cracks within Jharkhand - as the BJP aggressively pushed for a majority, it brought together the caste Hindus in its support. However, that left a space for the JMM to bring on identity politics and walk away with the adivasi votes. It was not easy for the JMM either - it lost Tundi, a stronghold which was once the base of Shibu Soren's activism against moneylenders.

The BJP's first move was to spread the rumour that it would consider a non-tribal CM. The JMM and Hemant Soren made use of the opportunity, whipped up sentiments about the BJP's alleged plans to amend the state's tenancy laws and portrayed the BJP as a party of outsiders. The results seems to have been a general adivasi aversion to the BJP. This BJP-JMM duality could also be the future of Jharkhand, especially if Babulal Marandi ends up supporting a BJP-led government.

This is what the BJP did in Jharkhand

This was published, edited, here.

For more on the topic, please read this and this.

A senior newspaper editor based out of Delhi once asked this reporter during the Jharkhand election campaign: "The BJP has not managed to form a government in the state, right?" Therein lay the victory of the BJP's advertisement brute force, sometimes passed off as an election campaign.

The format of the five-phased campaign to capture the state's 81 seats progressed in the format of a typical episode of the US television show Person of Interest: protagonists trying to ascertain if a certain individual is a victim or a perpetrator.

The BJP was quick to claim the victim's spot: it cast the JMM as the perpetrator and said that the Sorens were responsible for the under-development of Jharkhand. The party argued that the only difference between Jharkhand and the two other states formed alongside was that Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand have "stable" governments. It then claimed that the other two states have seen impressive growth and that the BJP is the only party capable of providing Jharkhand with a stable government.

In all this, the party was counting on short public memory: of the nine governments formed in the state since its formation in November 2000, four had BJP chief ministers.

Probably keeping in mind a largely rural, illiterate demographic, the BJP kept its message simple throughout: that all of Jharkhand's problems will be solved by electing a stable government. At almost no point during the campaign did the BJP bothered itself with the how of things. This attitude was exhibited in the linear nature of its video advertisements - the narrator asks what Jharkhand's biggest problem is, someone who looks like a voter responds by naming an issue, the narrator asks what the solution is and the voter says, "Bhaajpa ka button dabi, kamal khili," in the Nagpuri dialect.

To its credit, the BJP had latched on to a genuine grievance of Jharkhandis: the state and its people have often been laughed at for its tumbling governments. By owning the issue, the BJP made sure that anyone who even expressed the desire to see stable governance would be seen as supporting it. In fact, as the campaign evolved, voters came to express a certain sympathy for the BJP: "They should be given one chance," was an expression one often heard from villagers.

The promise of stable government made, the BJP needed a credible face to tell it to the people. Prime Minister Narendra Modi therefore came to occupy that space; mostly because it would bring back memories of failed governments past, the BJP was loathe to project anyone from the old guard as chief minister. Despite the state unit of the party taking the effort to publish a 56-page manifesto, PM Modi set the agenda. Apart from the issue of instability, two concerns occupied his speeches - Sorens and adivasis. The party did not actively reach out to any other social groupings: the BJP did not have a Muslim candidate, the dalits of the state largely consider themselves Hindus.

The verbal duel between the PM and CM got very personal at times: responding to Modi's comments about his family's influence, CM Soren once said he was sorry the PM did not have children. As for the adivasis, Modi was selective - while speaking in dalit-majority Chandwa in Latehar district in the first phase, Modi never mentioned the adivasis. By the time the campaign reached the other end of the state in the fifth phase, Modi was actively wooing the adivasis in Dumka.

This in turn led to two fresh conflicts. BJP said it formed Jharkhand; JMM coined a slogan to counter it: "Hum ne banaya, hum sawarenge." The other was in response to attacks by Rahul Gandhi, with Modi saying the Congress had forgotten adivasis and that it needed Atal Bihari Vajpayee's first government to form a Ministry of Tribal Welfare.

The BJP could afford to not talk about micro issues with this magic wand approach of its leader. Left wing extremism was one: apart from a few perfunctory remarks, Modi offered nothing new in his speeches. In that respect, he was in line with the party's manifesto, which had only four lines on the topic. The PM almost never mentioned the former BJP governments in the state, lest it refresh voters' memories.

With the help of the regional media, the BJP had moved seamlessly from its initial target of a single-party-government to the slogan of ending instability after its Delhi leadership forced through an alliance with the AJSU Party. The party managed to stay on message till the campaign approached the last phase of polling in the Santhal Pargana. The JMM and Hemant Soren managed to turn the tables briefly there, portraying the BJP - "a party of outsiders" - as the perpetrator.

At that point, the BJP reached for its fail-safe in Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He delivered, addressing massive rallies in Dumka and Barhait constituencies, where Hemant Soren contested from. The BJP knew the PM's focus on him will lionise CM Soren, but that did not bother its campaign managers. Their target was never really the Sorens, after all: it was a win, at any cost.

Modi goes to Hemant's constituencies as BJP unleashes Santhal Pargana atttack

This was published, edited, here. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday took on Jharkhand Chief Minister head-on today, addressing rallies in both constituencies where Hemant Soren is contesting from.

It was a tacit acknowledgement that Hemant Soren, a first-time MLA, has grown big enough to warrant the BJP's undivided attention. The BJP needs to improve its tally of two seats in the 16 constituencies that go the boiths as part of the last phase on December 20. For this, it needs to weaken the JMM, which holds 10 seats of the 16.

Modi addressed rallies within Dumka and Barhait constituencies. Speaking at the Dumka airport in a speech that lasted about 35 minutes, Modi pulled a few punches against Hemant Soren, using the baap-bete reference only once in the JMM stronghold which is currently the CM's constituency. At Barhait, where Hemant is going up against JMM defector Hemlal Murmu, the PM was more combative: "This baap-bete will not let anyone get ahead." This has become a strategy of Modi: attack an individual anywhere but his stronghold; the PM probably understands unrestrained attacks could have a backlash among people of the area.

The strategy of the PM going to the two constituencies could backfire if Hemant manages to win both. "We are willing to take that chance. The important thing is to show now that we are not afraid," said a member of the BJP's campaign team at the state headquarters.

At Dumka, Modi said in passing that, ".... none of you have got anything, but the baap-bete's coffers have been filled." He seemed to be cautious of treading a fine line when criticising the Sorens: "If a child commits an error, will his mother reward him with a laddoo? Won't the mother punish to correct the child?" Modi then went on to suggest that the voters should punish the Sorens. "Even if you like them, you should vote for the BJP to punish them.... Punish them now so that they will be of use to you five years later."

Modi campaigned for nine candidates, including one of the LJP, at Dumka. Upon arrival at 12 PM, when Dumka candidate Louis Marandi bowed in welcome after gifting him a traditional Santhali shawl, Modi too bowed. Later, the PM began his speech with a greeting in Santhali language even as he performed the Johar, clutching the right elbow and touching the forehead with a clenched right first. The district administration had planned for a crowd of 50,000; over a lakh turned up according to a source with access to the SPG's assessment.

Even though adivasis in the crowd were far outnumbered, Modi made it a point to talk about them extensively. "I am willing to give my life for the welfare of my poor adivasis," the PM said. The BJP is seeking to bring together the adivasis into its vote base of Santhal Pargana's "outsiders" in order to breach the JMM stronghold. ".... They (Opposition) tell adivasis that Modi government will take away your land. I tell you, there is no one in this country who can take away the rights of the adivasis," Modi said.

Modi said that adivasis in various states had repeatedly elected BJP governments. "BJP governments have given away the maximum land titles," he said. However, Modi's proclamations on adivasis received lukewarm response from the audience. On the other hand, when the PM mentioned jobs and unemployment for all, the crowd cheered as one.

Modi said adivasis had not asked for government bungalows, official vehicles and gold. Instead, they want only water, education and medicines. "Should the government not give all this? If they could not do all this, what were they doing?" Modi asked, signalling a digging action with his hands. "Loot! They have looted with both hands. You have blessed me to end this loot," Modi said, adding that he was a chowkidar in Delhi.

Insider role in Chaibasa jailbreak?

This was published, edited, here.

Police suspect the involvement of a guard in the Chaibasa jailbreak by Maoists on Tuesday evening, when CCTV cameras, mobile jammers and warning sirens at the facility did not work.

Senior officers are yet to believe the jail guards' claim that the prisoners threw chili powder on them during the incident. None of the 15 who escaped have been apprehended; police officers admit in private they are not hopeful of catching most of them.

Sentries on the rooftop of the district jail in the heart of the town, about half a kilometre from the Superintendent of Police's office, had opened fire when a total of 20 prisoners attempted to flee at about 4.15 PM on Tuesday. They had been part of a group of 55 being returned from the district court after hearings. Two senior commanders of the CPI-Maoist's PLGA were killed while 15 others escaped; three others were involved in a scuffle with jail guards and were subdued after suffering minor injuries.

West Singhbhum district's Superintendent of Police Narendra Kumar Singh said Mochirai Munda, an ex-serviceman employed as a jail guard on a contractual basis, has been named in the First Information Report. "He has been named along with those who escaped as he was responsible for opening both the gates. He should have closed the main gate before opening the second. We will interrogate him to find out if it was intentional," said SP Singh.

The jail van, with 55 undertrials inside, reversed into the premises through the main gate. Munda, who held the keys to the main as well as a smaller entrance through which prisoners had to go on foot, left the main gate wide open. Thirty five prisoners had passed through the second gate when Ramvilas Tanti and Tipa Das, both platoon commanders and the seniormost among the 20 left, began attempting to snatch the guards' weapons.

Guards have since told their superiors that the prisoners threw chilli powder on their faces, but SP Singh said he had found no evidence to support their claim yet. As the prisoners ran out, police personnel who had escorted the van in two bullet-proof vehicles and an escort vehicle from the local police station fired in the air. After this, two sentries on top of the jail's roof shot at Das and Tanti, who were left behind as they had been trying to make away with the weapons. Both bodies were found between the main and second gates.

"We have given show-cause notices to 15 personnel, which includes the 10 who were in the three escort vehicles outside the jail. We want to find out why they were not able to apprehend the fleeing suspects," said SP Singh. Police have not yet come across any evidence that the prisoners had help on the outside. "I think they picked yesterday because the Mangala haat (weekly bazaar) sits on Tuesdays," said the SP. Once the fleeing men were among the crowd, they became one with it.

However, suspicion of help from inside lingers. "We are trying to find out how the siren that was sound in case of a jailbreak did not sound. We have to find out for how long the CCTV directed at the main gate and jammers have been inactive," said SP Singh. As the 20 outside made their escape attempt, the 35 who had gone through the second gate tried to get out, which raises doubts that there were a larger conspiracy afoot. The 35 could not get out as guards closed the gate immediately.

There will be a Magisterial inquiry into the shooting. The SP and the Deputy Commissioner of Chaibasa will prepare a joint report on the incident. Inspector General (Prisons) Shailendra Bhushan, who was at the Chaibasa jail on Wednesday, has been asked by Home Secretary N.N. Pandey to inquire into the incident. "I am currently talking to various individuals to get an understanding of what happened. No new information has surfaced yet," said Bhushan over phone.

For SP Singh, appointed this January, the loss is particularly difficult to digest. "We had made 45 Naxal arrests and topping the state in terms of arrests. It was so difficult to arrest them - Tipa Das was arrested in August from Cuttack when he went to be treated for an ailment - and now, all that is lost," said Singh.

For similar reasons, police officers admit it would be difficult to arrest most of those who escaped. "Johnson Ganjhu, who was an area commander and is the seniormost of those who escaped, was boycotted by his party. It will take him at least six months to regain their trust. That is a useful window for us," said an officer who did not want to be quoted for this story. As for the rest, police expect them to leave the district. "They will go to Delhi, Punjab and work as labourers. Almost all of them were low-level operatives like couriers and were charged with relatively minor offences. Unless someone surrenders, they will face even bigger sentences for this jailbreak," the officer continued, "These are guys who make a mistake only once."

The incident has also brought to light the need for video conferencing facilities inside the jail. There have been multiple cases of prisoners escaping or attempting to during court appearances. "The Chaibasa jail does not have it currently. Ideally, we should be able to present prisoners through VC after presenting them before a court only once," said the officer.

Chaibasa jail has witnessed a jailbreak by Maoists before, in 2011. All three who escaped that day remain at large - Sandeep has since grown to become one of the seniormost leaders of the party in the state.

Marandi becomes TSPC's Trojan Horse at state assembly gates

This was published, edited, here.

Babulal Marandi's JVM-P, depleted by the flight of eight of its 11 MLAs, is performing a dangerous experiment in Chatra district's Simariya constituency by promoting a candidate who is using the opportunity to further the cause of a banned organisation he has links to.

Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) has nominated Ganesh Ganjhu to the Simariya seat; Ganesh is the elder brother of Brajesh Ganjhu, the supremo of the banned left wing extremist organisation Tritiya Sammelan Prastuti Committee. 

The TSPC has thrown its weight behind Ganesh, especially in the Lawalong block where its main leaders live: no other party managed to open campaign offices there. Reports from the ground indicate TSPC, whose supremo Brajesh is widely expected to eventually become a politician, has used its clout to support JVM-P candidates in the adjoining Chatra and Latehar constituencies, which voted on November 25.

Former CM Babulal Marandi knows the dangers of extremism well: his son Anup Marandi was killed by alleged Maoists in 2007. Yet, cornered after most his legislators defected to the BJP, Marandi - who has always stood for a clean public image - seems to have prioritised survival over everything else. His party had also given its Tamar ticket to Mahadev Ravinath Pahan, related to Kundan Pahan, the state's second-most-wanted Maoist leader.

By giving the TSPC the opportunity to win three seats, Marandi risks being beholden to the Ganjhu brothers if they succeed. It is also a measure of the TSPC’s growth over the past five years that it now aspires to win three seats.

The JMM is also not far behind: among others, it has given tickets to wives of former Maoists in Tamar and Chatra; its Simariya candidate Rajkumari Devi is the wife of banned organisation Jharkhand Prastuti Committee's supremo Guddu Ganjhu.

"Babulal Marandi is a good leader, but he has spoilt his party's name by giving ticket to Ganesh here," said Binod Bihari Paswan, the Communist Party of India's Simariya candidate, who was fired upon by unknown assailants on Saturday night. "I am sure it was the TPC. Before I filed my nomination, two boys on a bike had threatened me by saying only Ganesh Ganjhu will contest from here," said Binod, whom the bullets missed and who now moves around with seven bodyguards.

The BJP has also complained to the Election Commission, alleging it's workers have been beaten up. "Ganesh Ganjhu has not let my supporters campaign in Lawalong. The administration is refusing to take our complaints seriously," said BJP's candidate Sujeet Bharati. This newspaper has reported that the TSPC was formed by the state police and continues to enjoy its patronage.

In the 2010 elections to local bodies, the TSPC had ensured that most of Lawalong would be represented by its nominees, elected unopposed. Brajesh Ganjhu his himself the deputy panchayat president of Lawalong. Sources in Lawalong told this newspaper that Ganesh's campaign was on Monday - the eve of the campaign - distributing blankets among voters. These blankets were presumably supplied by the state government to panchayats to be given to people for the season.

Earlier this year, chief minister Hemant Soren had told the state assembly that former DGP V.D. Ram had formed the TSPC; Ram is currently a Lok Sabha member of the BJP - there were allegations that the TSPC had supported his attempt to be Palamu MP. The TSPC had supported the BJP's LS campaign in Chatra too - as Ganesh was then a BJP member. He had moved over from the JMM, which had given him a ticket in 2009: he came second.

This assembly election, Chatra's outgoing MLA and RJD candidate Janardhan Paswan had alleged the TSPC supported JVM-P candidate Satyanand Bhokta by holding Jan Adalats. This newspaper had reported from Latehar on how a TSPC squad threatened villagers, demanding votes for JVM-P's Prakash Ram. In contrast, the JVM-P's LS election candidate Neelam Devi - a Prakash Ram choice - was reportedly supported by the CPI-Maoist.

Maoists allege CRPF used villagers as human shields; victims corroborate

This was published, edited, here.

Kaleshwar, left and Surender, right
reveal injuries

During a meeting within Latehar district, the spokesperson of the CPI-Maoist's Koel Sankh Zone has alleged that CRPF personnel used the villagers - even women and children - of Lai as human shields during an encounter on November 26.

Five Lai villagers to whom this newspaper talked to corroborated the Maoists' version; they went further and added that even the women among them were abused and beaten by CRPF personnel during the course of the day. Lai has an almost exclusively adivasi population; three of the eight detained for about three days by the police were of the Parhaiya tribe, classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group.

The formation allegedly adopted by the CRPF is similar to that adopted by the paramilitary force in the aftermath of a January 7 encounter. The attempt, to retrieve the bodies of their dead colleagues, had resulted in the death of four villagers when they were allegedly forced to retrieve the bodies.

In a phone conversation with this newspaper, Michael S. Raj said the allegations were a propaganda effort by Maoists, who forced the villagers to say what they said.

The Lai encounter took place during the day on November 26, as CRPF and CoBRA personnel were on the 12 km stretch from Kotam village to Sarju police picket within Garu block. They were returning after providing security to the first phase of polling in Manika constituency, held the previous day. EVMs and civilian officials had already been airlifted.

"Our PLGA team was waiting in ambush, but the CRPF took another route. So our team followed them and began the encounter at about 8.30 in the morning," said the CPI-Maoist leader who assumed the sobriquet of spokesperson Manasji for this interview. The name has been used by multiple Maoist leaders since Lalesh Yadav, who used to handle the responsibilities of spokesperson using the name, was killed last year. This particular leader, a senior operative in the Maoist organisation, refused to be identified by his real name for this story.

The encounter would go on till about four in the evening, at the end of which the Maoists burnt eight tractors carrying the CRPF's supplies before retreating in the face of the arrival of massive reinforcements. There were no injuries on either side; it was ultimately the villagers, caught in between, who suffered.

Maoists claim that the PLGA had asked villagers of Lai - a village with 85 households and a population of 400 - to move out as they took positions. However, villagers were in the village as the encounter began.

Manti Kumari (18), who lives closest to the location the security forces were concentrated in - there are four bullet holes on the outside of her house - said that about five CRPF personnel arrived at her door an hour into the encounter. "They began slapping me and my sister. She was beaten more than me," she said. This newspaper is withholding Manti's sister's name as she is likely a minor - 16 years old and a ninth standard student.

Manti said they were taken to their brother's empty house and asked to search inside. "All the while, while, the forces kept calling us Maoists and kept abusing us. Once they confirmed Jiten's house was empty, they kept saying we had to take off our clothes. We refused. They later left us in a different part of the village," she said.

Around the same time, security forces searched Jagdish Parhaiya's house and found three country-made guns. "I have to go into the jungle all the time; I am a Parhaiya, after all. It comes in handy while hunting," said Jagdish (60). "They dragged me and my son out and started beating us. He was beaten with lathis," said Jagdish. Surender Parhaiya (22), who was celebrating the sixth day of his firstborn's birth, has six marks on his back, allegedly from being beaten with lathis.

Kaleshwar Parhaiya (51) was hit with the butt of a rifle as he sat crouched in his potato field to escape the crossfire; he has two half-moon marks on his back. Indermani Devi, his wife said she was kicked on the back and beaten with lathis as she sat on her haunches. Sushil Oraon (25), said the personnel who entered his premises shouted at him saying, "Yeh hai Naxali hero" and took him along with about 50 others to Chiratola Middle School, two kilometres away. "Almost all of us has our hands tied - they did not tie women's hands. They asked us men to take off our shirts and tied our hands with it," said Sushil. When asked to describe how they were taken, Sushil said, ".... beaten throughout, like cattle."

Security forces, which had retreated along with the tractors, to the school's vicinity, then attempted to get out quickly by instructing the tractors to move out quickly. They also sent out a villager to scout the area. Personnel followed on foot, with villagers and Maoists alleging that they took shelter behind villagers' bodies.

The position described by villagers - and demonstrated - was similar to what the CRPF allegedly used in Amwatikar village of Latehar on January 8. This was when they were attempting to retrieve the bodies of 10 jawans killed in an encounter the previous day. Four villagers were killed and a fifth injured as an IED that the Maoists had planted inside the abdomen of a dead jawan exploded.

"They made us stand in a (horizontal) line and walked behind us, adjusting our position from the back," said Sushil. By then, the Maoists had intercepted the tractors. "When the Maoists saw us, they began shooting. The bullets passed overhead. The forces crouched when they saw the Maoists and began shooting from behind us. We also crouched," Sushil said.

Maoist spokesperson Manasji claimed the PLGA stopped shooting when they saw the villagers were in the way. "The PLGA did not want to harm the villagers, so they stopped shooting. Then a decision was made to set the tractors on fire," said Manasji. He claimed the Maoists did not get time to take out what he estimated was 5000-odd bullets and several grenades from within the tractors, but this newspaper saw no evidence of the remains of these items at the encounter site.

"The fact that the Maoists invited you to the region and told you about the incident means that they are making this a propaganda issue. If the villagers had invited, it was a different matter altogether," said Latehar SP Michael Raj. He said that Jagdish Parhaiya, from whom weapons were recovered, were let off after an investigation. "Lai is in a region where the Maoists enjoy immense support. They have forced the villagers to make these claims," said the SP.

After the encounter, the security forces took along eight men - including Jagdish Parhaiya - and detained them for about two days before letting them off without levelling any charges. "The rest were let off at the banks of the river, but they asked us to carry their belongings across. However, when we crossed, they took us all the way to the Sarju (police) picket," said Sushil.

Only Jha-Pa in Lapa: the PLFI now has a political footprint

This was published, edited, here.

Rosalia - foreground - sitting outside the polling booth in Lapa.

Rosalia Barla (69) walked around the campus of the R.C. Primary Middle School in Khunti district's Lapa, beaming.

"They say Lapa is home to criminals. To them I say, Jharkhand is full of criminals. If criminals lived in my village, would we have such a peaceful election?" she said outside the school, booth number 18 within Torpa assembly constituency as the number of votes polled shot up to 132 in the third hour at 10.10 AM, from 11 and 70 each in the first two. The booth in Lapa, within Karra block, had 1047 registered voters from the village's five hamlets.

Even Rosalia - a resident of Lapa's Sarnatoli hamlet in which the school is located and who is also the president of Barkaspur panchayat - would not easily admit to the existence of the forces that have helped Lapa help pretend peace existed on Tuesday morning.

As it turned out, the village's most famous product had visited the previous night. "Dinesh told me to vote for the Jha-Pa candidate. I told him Jha-Pa would merely go and support a larger party and that we should support one of the two national parties. He just repeated that we have to vote for Jha-Pa," said an individual who claimed to have met with Dinesh Gope on Monday night.

xxxx

Dinesh Gope is the supremo of the People's Liberation Front of India, the largest left wing extremist splinter group in Jharkhand. Gope was born in the Morhatoli hamlet of Lapa. At times during this year, the PLFI was so virulent that it exceeded the CPI-Maoist in terms of violent incidents. The organisation, which has of late become all about the collection of protection money from individuals and enterprises, is often blamed to be the primary reason why Jharkhand has topped the country in LWE-related incidents in 2012: PLFI rarely fights the security forces and instead prefers to mostly kill civilians alleging them to be police informers. The PLFI is active mainly in the South Chotanagpur division - Khunti, Simdega, Gumla, Ranchi and Lohardaga districts.

The PLFI, which supported its former Zonal Commander Paulus Surin's successful bid from jail to be the Torpa MLA in 2009 on a JMM ticket, has abandoned him this time. Gope was reportedly angry with Surin's inability to successfully lobby the Hemant Soren government to lift a police picket outside a school owned by him. The PLFI has instead supported Jharkhand Party - Jha-Pa to villagers - candidate Suman Bhengra in Torpa. This will only raise the blood pressure of Surin, who never camped in Torpa during his tenure, instead preferring to travel all the way to his quarters within the state assembly campus each night.

The PLFI's support to Jha-Pa only raises suspicion that the party has now become a proxy for the extremist organisation. This should eventually lead to questions about its legality - Jha-Pa chief Anosh Ekka and MLA of Simdega district's Kolebira is currently in jail for a murder he allegedly ordered the PLFI to commit. Ekka, a former minister who is also a candidate, has long been suspected to be the main source of funding and political power to the PLFI. Ekka has also nominated his wife Menon Ekka to the Simdega constituency. Those who have heard the police's recording of tapped conversations between Ekka and PLFI area commander Vikram Gope claim Gope - and his bosses were reluctant to murder para-teacher Manoj Kumar, but had to carry it out on Ekka's insistence.

xxxx

Only the Jha-Pa managed to campaign within Lapa: this newspaper spotted a single cloth-banner featuring Ekka's picture on a tree in the village. "The Congress tried to come in, but some boys from the sangathan [PLFI] threatened them en route and turned them away," said a villager. Lapa is located on the border of Karra and is at the intersection of Ranchi's Lapung, Khunti's Torpa and Gumla's Kamdara, which makes it a tough spot to police. Across the river that runs along Bakaspur panchayat is Kamdara's Banpur, where the PLFI allegedly killed seven people on November 3. Gope was reportedly present for the massacre.

Rosalia was a government teacher and anganwadi sevika before she was elected unopposed. She does not deny the PLFI had a hand in it. "They insisted that I should be the mukhiya. I declined, but they kept coming back. I was scared, I even told the police station incharge that I would not contest," she said. Later, the police named her in an FIR along with multiple local self-government representatives for being allegedly PLFI supporters. The case against her has since been dropped. "I finally told the party that I will leave my good job and contest if they made sure I was elected unopposed. I didn't want to be the laughing stock of the village at this old age," she said.

On Tuesday, Lapa did not have the booth agents of any party: it would have been wasteful, because the villagers had already been told whom to vote for. The village received electricity only in November: they thank outgoing legislator Paulus Surin for it. Youngsters were conspicuous by their absence in the queue outside the booth. "A large number of villagers are out of the state, working as labourers. My son in working in someone's farm in Punjab," said Barla, who lost another son to migration: "He died the same day he arrived in Goa to work at a seafood-processing factory. They could not even send back his body."

Barla insists she does not support the PLFI. "I will not even contest in the next panchayat elections. I admit I have not been able to bring vikas to this village; I am taking solace in the fact that I managed to get 25 ration cards issued in my panchayat," she said. An individual who is familiar with the governance of the panchayat said the PLFI demands anywhere between 5-10 percent "levy" on every expense. "We don't even have shops in Lapa. The party asks for money even from them. The panchayat representatives are afraid to be corrupt for one major reason - if the party hears they take money, they will demand cuts from them, too," said the villager.

Barla refused to talk about how the PLFI interferes in local administration. However, she chuckled when she talked about how she managed once to convince Gope to do the right thing. "His boys were taking supplies away from our four public distribution shops. I managed to meet Dinesh and pleaded with him not to trouble the poor villagers. They stopped," she said.

Despite all this, Gope - a Yadav - retains the support of a large number of people in his village. "He took up a gun to resist the Rajputs of Barkatoli [one of the five hamlets of Lapa]. The Rajputs were troubling our girls, stealing our things and looking down on us. Now, they are scared," said the villager who refused to be named for this story.

To be a Maoist in Jharkhand

(This was published, edited, here.)

In the dark about what his bosses think about him, yest over-worked and under-rested. Separated from his wife and unable to see his mother who suffers from mouth cancer. 

Jeevan Kandulna (36) could be just be another Indian man who keeps his emotions bottled. However, Jeevan's is no ordinary life.

In a rare, candid interview, a platoon commander of the Communist Party of India-Maoist's People's Liberation Guerrilla Army spoke to this newspaper in the past week within the Porahat forest of Jharkhand's West Singhbhum district.

Jeevan assumed de-facto charge of the crucial Porahat sub-zone when senior leader Prasadji - whose real name is Krishan Ahir - was picked up by Ranchi police on August 13. "The party has not yet sent a replacement for Prasadji. In fact, no senior leader has talked to me since his arrest. I am supposed to co-ordinate with Bundu sub-zonal commander Dheeraj-da, but it has not been easy," said Jeevan, a Munda adivasi who uses the name Gajendra Singh, hails from Khunti district's Torpa block.

A full platoon of the PLGA comprises 30 fighters. There are at least two other platoons in the Porahat sub-zone. Kundan Pahan, the second-most wanted Maoist leader in the state, moves around with one of them.

The police made another significant arrest after Prasadji's, taking in Mukhlal Mahto (Mochu), who they say replaced Prasadji in Ranchi's Silli sub-zone. Jeevan disputes this: "As far as I know, the in-charge of Silli has been Pragati-da. But then, I wouldn't be so sure - I have not been reading newspapers for the last few months."

When this newspaper visited the site from where police say Mochu was arrested, villagers claimed he was brought in a police vehicle and that no encounter with his squad took place, as claimed by the police. With Prasadji, senior police officers have confirmed to this newspaper that he was picked up while on his way to meet his girlfriend and that no encounter had taken place as claimed before the the media.

Despite the arrests, Jeevan believes Silli has been a major gain. "The party was never present in Silli. We used to use it only as a corridor (connecting West Bengal's Purulia district) and could not afford to stay. We established a sub-zone and Prasadji was given additional charge of it earlier this year," said Jeevan.

The reason why Jeevan could not read newspapers was because he was down with brain malaria since June. Later, when Kundan Pahan's elder brother Dimba - a platoon commander who uses the name Suresh - joins us, he also reveals he was recently diagnosed with malaria.

Jeevan admits the party organisation is not in a healthy state in his region. "We had to hurriedly celebrate the Martyrs' Week (July) this year. The Foundation Week celebrations too, were held hurriedly in four places. The police were swarming here," he said. The Maoists have not managed to conduct the Tactical Counter Offensive Campaign - when they plan and execute major attacks against security forces - yet this year. The party is yet to announce its plan of action ahead of the assembly elections here.

"When a school teacher was arrested for being our supporter, we tried to conduct a mass agitation demanding that his replacement be posted immediately. People did not turn up in large numbers," he said. The party has been trying to mobilise alleged victims of sexual harrassment by security forces on anti-left wing extremist operations, but villagers remain scared to speak up. "I have asked a victim and her father to meet me. They are not coming forward," said Jeevan, constantly reminding us that his operational area shares space with Birsa Munda's.

Jeevan says the grassroots organisation has gone missing: "The party works through its committees. We don't have the Nari (Mukti Sangh) and (Krantikari) Kisan Committee are non-existent. I am the only person running the party here; there should be at least three." The situation is akin to a civilian head of state also being the chief of armed staff. In a sign that the Maoist party has come to be an overtly militaristic organisation, Jeevan says his militia is still strong. "Recruitment is still healthy. Our cadres could do with more training, though. Also, a number of them are not staying for long," he said.

In July this year, the West Singhbhum police had arrested a man travelling with 13 minors. He named Jeevan, saying the children had been on their way to join his squad. Most of the 10-15 sentries who secured the perimeter and kept watch looked like they were pushing the envelope when it comes to looking over 18 years old. When they were making their cadres pose for photographs, Suresh mumbled, "Only the two of us are left as seniors. Everyone else is gone."

Jeevan says he joined the party in 2009. His story is symptomatic of the conditions the CPI-Maoist operates in South Chotanagpur. "I joined after a neighbour who was with the PLFI (People's Liberation Front of India, the state's largest splinter group) killed one of my sisters. Those in my family then began attempting to kill him or his relatives," said Jeevan. Eventually, when he needed external support to counter the PLFI, Jeevan went over to the Maoists. His village is less than a kilometre from Jiten Gudiya's, the PLFI's second-in-command.

The PLFI is the enemy that knows the Maoists all too well and is the immediate threat. Jeevan admits of the three areas in his sub-zone, his party has no presence in one. "They keep coming into our territory. When we try to encounter them, they run away," he said.

The police are also closing in. Jeevan's wife Nirmala was arrested on July 8. This means Jeevan is yet to see his daughter, who was two months old then. He insists his wife was never a member of the party even while admitting two of his sisters were. "Recently, the police took my brother to meet my wife. It must have been to convince me to surrender, because he came back saying the government would give me land, money and five police security guards if I gave up arms," he said. Neither the state's or the central government's surrender policies have provisions for armed guards. He laughs at the suggestion, though. "It was easy to identify and fight the amgrez. On the other hand, these kala angrez - those who cheat our people - are not easy targets," he said.

Jeevan talks of a night early in October when he went to visit his mother, who has cancer in the mouth. "I had to see her because I had not been home for a long time due to my malaria. My parents keep telling me not to come as the police keep an eye out for me. As soon as I reached, the police arrived. I ran, hid in the forest for a day and escaped," he said.

As if it was an afterthought, Jeevan also says that his joining had to do with more than personal gains. "I was there when the Koel-Karo firing took place. I saw people die because they did not have anything to fight back with," he said. The February 2, 2001 firing, which took place in what is now Khunti district, resulted in the death of eight people when police took on those agitating against a hydroelectric project.

Love Tinderbox

The Sangh Parivar had organised a bandh in Ranchi on Monday. On Thursday, the BJP called for one in Chatra. Today, the VHP has declared a shutdown in Khunti. On the day after Eid too, there was a bandh by the Sangh Parivar - to protest a clash in Ranchi between Muslims, adivasis and the police the previous day, in which one individual had died.

The Monday bandh was protesting the delay in the arrest of Ranjeet Singh Kohli, whose wife Tara Shahdeo alleged that he had assaulted her with the intention of converting her to Islam. The Sangh Parivar alleged that it was a case of Love Jihad. The momentum it created through a campaign wholeheartedly supported by the media helped them proclaim an incident in Chatra too, as an instance of Love Jihad and declare another bandh. On Friday, the VHP is protesting the alleged vandalising of an idol in at least one temple in Khunti.

November cannot come soon enough for Jharkhand. As the state inches closer to possibly holding elections that month, the sense is that a communal stake is being driven into the society, one hammering at a time.

Those who usually brand journalists as "paid and sickular" at the first available opportunity have been silent through the reporting surrounding the Tara-Ranjeet case. The media has given them little reason to be aggrieved about. "Do you think he [Ranjeet] is part of the ISI?" asked the reporter of a news channel to Tara in the presence of this newspaper. The 23-year-old, once an Eastern Zone champion in 10 m air rifle, looked perplexed. Another channel showed video footage of Ranjeet's mother swaying at her son's wedding to argue that she was well enough to assault her daughter-in-law.

The English dailies jumped on the bandwagon, too. Reporting on the seizure of Ranjeet's passport, one of them called him only as Rakibul Hasan Khan, the name Tara alleges he uses while in his Islamic identity. The newspaper's insistence on using the name came despite the passport itself being in Ranjeet Singh Kohli's name. Another published a report which claimed Ranjeet was being probed for terror links without having a single official say - either on or off the record - about the nature of allegations. The only quote on the claim is one by the state DGP, who merely says his force is probing, "all angles." By that yardstick, Ranjeet surely should be a suspect in the FIFA bribery scandal. The headline to a report in an English daily here on Friday has gone ahead and called Ranjeet a "love jihadist."

What the media does not realise is that it is becoming propaganda tools in the process. When the BJP declared a bandh in Chatra on Thursday, it alleged that a Muslim boy had been arrested for deceiving a Hindu girl into marrying him. The media has largely gone by the BJP-VHP version of events. Muslim Boy Jailed For Deceiving Girl goes the headline to a report in an English daily, which begins, "Another case of alleged love jihad was reported from Chatra district...." The report ignore the fact that the FIR does not mention conversions and that the boy was jailed because he had sexual relations with the girl, a minor. On Thursday, a Hindi daily reported that the family of a girl in Hazaribagh was alleging that she had been kidnapped by Muslim boys for religious conversion. The paper played up the conversion claim, relegating the Superintendent of Police's explanation that the couple had been in a relationship and had eloped, to the last sentence of its report.

What the reporting around the Tara-Ranjeet case in Jharkhand has exposed is also a shifting of goalposts by the Sangh Parivar: that it has altered the definition of its own conspiracy theory to suit its aims. When the Love Jihad allegations first surfaced in Kerala and Mangalore in 2008-'09, the Sangh Parivar alleged a larger conspiracy whereby Muslim boys were asked to entrap Hindu girls. Now, as the Chatra and Hazaribagh incidents would indicate, it is Love Jihad enough to "deceive" or fall in love with a Hindu girl on your own. Even the Sangh Parivar has alleged that Ranjeet is part of a wider network and the media has picked up on the insinuation, but there has been no evidence or anecdote to support the claim.

Surely, a lot of allegations against Ranjeet may come true yet. The police say he has accepted that he has friends in the judiciary, that he kept a room for himself in a hotel in Ranchi to entertain high-profile guests late into the night and that he assaulted his wife once. He has even accepted that he performed the nikaah two days after marrying Tara in a Hindu ceremony, but claims it was with the girl's consent and that he has never converted to Islam himself. However, media organisations have been only too happy to fill in the gaps in the story with theories of their own: when a former neighbour of the Kohlis' claims Ranjeet's mother was born a Muslim - which she denies - journalists wrote that she may have influenced her son to convert.

The media seems to have pronounced judgement in a case with little documentary evidence and it may have provided the spark for those who want to start a fire. Whatever happened to "Minimise Harm?"

Who wants to be a journalist?

Why would anyone want to be a journalist today? The road to Delhi is littered with the carcasses of editors. No one is hiring; the looming implementation of the Wage Board recommendations mean salaries may not go up this year. New endeavours are few and failures have been spectacular: journalists have been asked to leave without dignified severance pays.

On a broader plane, things are even worse. Has the credibility of the media ever been lower in this country? The term Paid News has come to be synonymous with Paid Media and Paid Journalists, a brush with which to insult us all. The profession did not cover itself with glory this election season – there was a time when we crawled when asked to walk; this time, we cheered when all we had to do was report. Triumph of the Will, apparently. What were you thinking?!

It is time to recognise that this is a moment of crisis in Indian journalism. As the administrative machinery takes a sharp turn to the Right, we have to realise that – as Mukul Kesavan puts it so articulately - the republic’s ‘common sense’ will shift rightwards. Do we have the ability, the resources, the courage and the intellectual grounding to understand and then explain it to our readers as it happens? Or will we take sides and enable the forces that seek to curtail the same freedoms our calling needs to survive?

Understand that we brought this upon ourselves. By not reporting enough on agriculture. By not being outraged at health departments. By not doing our homework on the power sector. By not talking to people, by not “going to the spot,” by not looking at data. By not picking up a book. We let ourselves be complacent and assumed we knew the world. We relied on briefings by people with vested interests. We Wikipedia-ed. Ignorant, fattened on junk tertiary information, we sat down on that couch and let ourselves be overwhelmed by an information avalanche.

Understand, that in a battle between public relations and journalism, the latter did not even turn up. To borrow a phrase from the former, we lacked “effective communicators,” people who could decode the election for their audience. We had reporters with no understanding of economics lauding the idea of development. We did not know our history enough to place what was happening on the ground in a certain context. We lacked journalists with an ideological mooring that would have helped them separate the chaff from wheat. Instead, we had reeds go up against the wind.

Despite – and maybe precisely because of - these abject failures, we must call out for new journalists. For we need people to stand up and articulate against the teaching of “ancient historical texts.” We need people who treat the Ministry of External Affairs as a discipline, not a beat. We need people who became journalists not only because they were conned into studying English Literature for graduation. We need youngsters opting for journalism over the civil services. The pay will keep us firmly in the middle class, but let’s continue to naively justify to ourselves that this was a higher calling; let’s continue to be arrogant that we would have succeeded in whatever we chose to do.

For we came into this to change the world. At some point, we took it down a notch to justify the daily grind to ourselves, but the stones on which we stepped to reach that ideal remain the same: the same things that gave us goosebumps as children, reading Where The Mind Is Without Fear and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution of India and the American Declaration of Independence and Tryst With Destiny and I Have a Dream and The fight on the beaches and The Gettysburg Address. We cannot lose sight of the fact that we are what we are because we are the products of a free thinking society. Even if are not going to change the world, it is imperative on us to stand on the edges of free speech and defend encroachments. As those around us try to reduce us to monolithic identities, we need people who can come out in full expression of the multiple ones within. If we continue to be partisan, if we let ourselves be driven by hate rather than knowledge, there may not be a journalism to write home about tomorrow.

Understand, that the towers have fallen. There is nothing to look up to: our tallest news organisations and journalists are at their most vulnerable now. Instead, look within for the fire and integrity and look below to the Earth. The battle for the towers is something we won’t understand, anyway. Let’s take this fight to our street corners. Let’s pester them on facts, let’s engage them on the truth. That book we have been putting off, let’s read. Let’s poke a finger into those incidents and reports they hope will pass under the radar. Let’s place ourselves firmly in the corner of the underdog. Let’s reclaim journalism.

Jharkhand: guide to results

Published here
Ranchi, April 15

The BJP in Jharkhand will go into counting day confident that, on paper, it remains in contest in all 14 seats.

However, by making the elections all about itself - the party contested alone, and along with the JVM(P), is the only one to contest in all seats - the BJP state unit is flirting with the failure tag. Even one less than eight, which was the number of seats won in 2009, would have the panic bells going off.

Party leaders are confident of winning more than 10 seats. "We are guaranteed 12 seats. Giridih and Rajmahal are the two in which we are facing a tough contest," said BJP leader and MLA Raghubar Das. The Congress says it, along with alliance partner JMM, has a chance in eight constituencies. "I think we can win in Ranchi, Lohardaga, Hazaribagh, Dhanbad, Godda, Giridih, Rajmahal and Dumka," said state Congress General Secretary Shailesh Sinha.

There clearly cannot be a universe where both the BJP and Congress can go home happy. The confusion is evident in the exit poll results: NDTV thinks BJP will win 12 and leave the Congress only one, while Times Now estimates the Congress and JMM will win six. Both agree that former chief minister Madhu Kora's wife Geeta will win from Singhbhum.

Early warning could come from two constituencies - Giridih and Rajmahal, which both sides admit to be unknown territories. The BJP, in a "direct fight" with the JMM in both, knows winning the two will make it unstoppable. If the latter wins in Giridih, it will be a major blow for the BJP, whose incumbent MP won by 94,738 votes in 2009. It will also mean that the JMM votebank is robust, having withstood an assault from alliance partner Congress, whose leader Rajendra Prasad wanted the seat for his son. A JMM win will also mean the rise of a new Mahato leader in Jagarnath Mahato. That Rajmahal - and not Dumka - should be the barometer of Santhal Pargana is curious: BJP's victory hinges on adivasi votes in the constituency, which has a significant number of Muslims. The party hopes that former JMM leader Hemlal Murmu can get some tribal votes while hoping the RSS, which has been active in the area for about 25 years, can use the hype around Narendra Modi to rally Sanskritised adivasis.

However, even if the BJP completes a clean sweep, it may not be evidence enough of a pan-Jharkhand "Modi Wave": the difficult terrain, demographics and cultural differences in the state mean imposing a wave was always out of the question for the BJP. Even winning Dumka - stronghold of the JMM - may be interpreted as a Babulal Marandi effect, with the JVM(P) leader taking away JMM's votes, leading to a BJP victory.

However, there may be a Modi effect on view. The tribals remained largely disinterested in Narendra Modi - in fact, the Sarna Samiti, widely perceived to be moving towards the BJP, supported Congress candidates in Ranchi and Lohardaga. This has been used by the BJP in the Santhal Pargana to mobilise the non-tribal "diku" vote of the caste Hindus. The hype of a Wave was also used to activate cadres and banish disquiet - in Palamu and Hazaribagh, those dissenting against "outsider" candidates eventually fell in line to work for a Modi victory.

If the BJP candidates in Ranchi and Jamshedpur win, it could be evidence of a Modi Wave in these largely urban constituencies. These two constituencies are significant because the BJP was up against the wall in both places - Jamshedpur, where its candidate lost his deposit in a 2011 bye poll and whose incumbent MP is a very popular; Ranchi, where AJSU's Sudesh Mahto was poised to eat into BJP's Ram Tahal Choudhary's Mahato base.

The BJP also claims that the poll percentages going up in the state - from 50.97 in 2009 to 63.55 now - is because of a Modi Wave. While one cannot verify this claim yet, there remains the possibility that Muslims voted in large numbers too, by getting women to come out and vote. A BJP leader claimed caste Hindus had voted to counter that. "Only 52 per cent Muslims voted in Jamshedpur. The rest were women and youth coming out to vote for NaMo," he said, explaining how polling percentage went up from 51.12 in 2009 to 66.38 this time there.

Apart from Geeta Kora in Singhbhum, smaller parties stand a chance to spoil the BJP's party. The CPI (ML) Liberation has mobilised the dalits of Koderma effectively. In Khunti, no one really understands the impact of the alleged support extended by left wing extremist PLFI to Anosh Ekka.

Nitish and the Vikas Vote

That Nitish Kumar may not be rewarded for his good governance is one of the most perplexing issues to emerge out of Bihar this time. Though I definitely think there is an underpinning of caste, maybe there are esoteric issues at play here - as Shekhar Gupta seems to suggest, a Bihari craving for more. Even as I was working on this piece, the Times of India ran a story on it.

What gave me a lot of pleasure is the fact that after I finished it, I came across Gupta's and Sankarshan Thakur's pieces: the fact that such senior editors had looked at the same issue told me I was on the right track. I tend to agree with Thakur's piece more - the man's written a book on Nitish, goddammit - as it agrees with my worldview. However, Shekhar manages to catch a sense of what I was getting, too - people everywhere were telling me they wanted more. I put it down as quotes in my stories, but writing about what Shekhar tries to capture was beyond my brief. Also, is being aspirational a uniquely Bihari trait? Even Shekhar seems to agree how difficult it is to pin down this anti-Nitish feeling: "You need someone with much greater scholarship than I to explain this. Or maybe even a soil scientist."

Maybe we are all wrong. Maybe Nitish will emerge from this one giving the likes of me the middle finger. However, my concern - as with everything else that I have written during this election - is not losing or winning. I am merely looking at the factors at play, merely holding a wet finger in the air. However, whatever happens, most of us in the media would have missed one thing from Bihar this time: the question of what women want. With their husbands and brothers staring them down, I was not successful in this. I really hope some other reporter emerges with clues.

If Bihar is rejecting development politics - we may know for sure only after the 2015 assembly elections here - there are larger implications, of course. What does it mean for this post-liberalisation idea of vikas?

For the moment, the way I see it, both Narendra Modi as well as Nitish Kumar are poised to be foiled by caste in Bihar.



P.S. Friend and former colleague Vinay Sitapati too, has a piece on this today.

An edited version of the following was published here

Vaishali, May 6

You have to feel for Nitish Kumar. Statistics are testimony enough, but the people of the state have recognised that the JD(U) government has been good for them. This reporter is yet to come across someone who failed to reply in the affirmative; the trend is unlike the circumstances under which Sheila Dikshit had to leave Delhi: her voters seemed to have forgotten the massive infrastructural boost. Yet, the Bihari voter is refusing to vote for Kumar and his party this time.

So, some questions - however blunt - have to be asked: Is there no vote for development in Bihar? Is the Bihari electorate, which gave Lalu Prasad's "jungle raaj" 15 years, an ungrateful one?

The narrative that has gained currency is that the voters are poised to punish Kumar for his arrogance. However, scratch the surface a bit, and the complexity of the theory comes to the fore. "Because Nitish got arrogant. He was doing so well, but he had to go and anger the Yadavs. The police was told not to help us," Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, a Yadav voter who lives in the Hajipur Lok Sabha constituency. "He thought he could do it all on his own. We have to show him his rightful place," said Anirudh Kumar of the Teli caste who will vote in Vaishali, in reference to the JD(U) ending its alliance with the BJP.

So, Kumar clearly has multifaceted arrogance. Like almost everything in Bihar, it seems to be split along caste lines: the Yadav Theory of Kumar Arrogance clearly originates from Lalu Prasad, who in his speeches portrays Kumar as a shrewd operator who played a trick too many. The BJP's narrative has been that Nitish tried punching above his weight and should be taught a lesson for that.

Another theory is that the Extremely Backward Classes - a group that the Kumar government consolidated and the JD(U) considers a vote bank - identifies with Narendra Modi, who is from a caste of that standing. While it is something the BJP has been telling voters and journalists, there is scant evidence to prove it. This is mostly because the EBCs are consolidated only on paper - in the villages, they remain scattered with no unifying trait: Jai Narain Nishad is a Mallaah leader, not an EBC champion. In fact, the only two people who admitted they identified with Narendra Modi was a Teli - Anirudh, who said he liked the fact that Modi was from the "vaishya community" and Pankaj Kumar - a Bhumihar in Vaishali constituency who admitted he has a, "soft corner" for Modi. When the EBCs of Muzaffarpur district said they would vote for Modi, they explicitly said it was not because of his identity, but because of what he has promised to do. "My vote is for Narendra Modi. He said he will bring back black money.... I don't want a government that does not respond when soldiers' heads are cut off," said Fakeeri Sahni, a voter in Muzaffarpur.

Which begs the question - Why is the Bihari voter seemingly choosing Modi over Kumar for work the former only promises to do while ignoring the fact that the latter has been good for them over the past nine years? "Badlaav chaahiye," said Gautam Sahni, whose caste Mallaah falls in the EBC category and lives in the Vaishali constituency. The call for change is part of the BJP rhetoric - something that the party's leadership has customised here to mean the state government too.

According to Sahni, a graduate who organises tuition classes for school students, the government has done too much. "Why did he give reservation to women? Now, there are women netas, while their husbands sit at home. When it came to recruiting shiksha mitras, women got preference," he said. However, for him, the election boils down to one thing: "This is a Hindu-Musalmaan ladaayi. The Muslims are on one side, we are on the other."

As it turns out, Sahni's sister-in-law is a ward member - a direct beneficiary of the 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayats, which he opposes. "This government made so many laws for women. But then, do I sit where the rest of the village is sitting?" Renu Devi asks, not answering a question as to whether she still supports Nitish Kumar. With husband Sikander Sahni in the room, Devi's answers were limited to cryptic smiles. Whether the women of the backward castes, a constituency that the media does not talk to often, have exercised their free will in the polling booth is anyone's guess.

In some ways, the BJP's Kumar Arrogance Theory is right - the Bihar CM seems to be losing a leadership battle in which both Modi and Prasad have shown him his rightful place. If that is true, there is no better barometer than the Muslims, who have stood as one across the country against Narendra Modi's ambition: will they return to the JD(U) once the Modi mission is complete? "There is a case to renew Nitish Kumar's license," said Mohammad Javed, who lives in the Hajipur constituency, referring to a possible third term for the JD(U) government. "But will I vote for him in 2015? Let's see if he gives us a good candidate," he added.

Unlike what the Narendra Modi-heavy campaign of the BJP would have you believe, candidates do matter. To be precise, their castes do. With the BJP leaving by taking away the upper castes, the JD(U) is having to fend for itself with a bouquet of backward castes that are being lured with the promise of more development.

The grip of caste is so strong, one comes across many instances where people are torn by the choices they have to make. "Why can't the rest of Bihar vote for Nitish? We Yadavs cannot; he has troubled us so much, said Raghuvansh Singh of Hajipur. "No one in Bihar gives vote for work done," said Surendra Kumar Singh, a Bhumihar in Vaishali constituency. Singh, who himself will not vote for the JD(U), let his frustration spill at one point: "If only the Election Commission banned campaigning altogether. People would judge their leaders on work done," he said.

Pankaj Kumar, a very articulate youngster in Vaishali village of Vaishali district and a Bhumihar, probably put it best. "Itna se galti ka itne se sajja na milna chahiya tha [There shouldn't have to be such a harsh punishment for such a small error.]," he said, even as he indicated he wouldn't be voting for Nitish this time.

Kumar may have been crippled by the shocking Hindu-Muslim polarisation in the state and the caste divisions that followed, but in this frustration lies his hope. If he can keep the JD(U) together - the countryside is rife with rumours about Sharad Yadav's future - there could be a comeback waiting at the end of the next assembly elections. Having built his politics on the foundation laid by Lalu Prasad - who had to counter violent uppercaste hegemony with violence of his own - Kumar can afford to be non-confrontational, thus bringing together even the upper castes, unlike Prasad. "Look, he is not against us. The Chief Secretary and DGP are Bhumihars," said Surendra Singh of Vaishali.

The election as a personal emo trip

Election season came at a time of great personal and professional crisis for me. The companion of my every thought for the past year-odd was not around anymore; the wind in my sails was gone.

Election, then, became an excuse to launch myself mindlessly into the summer. There was no one to go home to, no one to reflect with at the end of the day. I didn't hear anyone telling me to take well-deserved-breaks at the end of long days in the sun. I packed a bag, and I left.

Lion capital at Vaishali, seen with a part of the Ananda stupa. If Modi contested from here,
I guess he would have claimed the Buddha called him. Fair enough.

It has been more than 45 days since that first trip. There have been a few one-day breaks in between, during which I spent planning the next day's journey. I must have gone numb at some point: I felt my joints ache for the first time on Friday, when all the reporting was done and the only job at hand was to file the last story. In the evening, as I took a walk around Patna's Gandhi Maidan, I realised I was scared of what lies ahead.

What I learned these 45 days should be fuel enough for a long journey. The first lesson was the most important and I have to thank a 2009 ethnographic study I was part of: I learned that, if I removed myself from the immediate concerns of winning and losing, I could actually learn quite a lot. That led to a near-obsessive effort to avoid predicting winners. The 2009 study was a booth-level one and even after talking to the booth's voters for more than a month, I wasn't able to predict how they would vote. Of late, I'm sure I came across as inadequate to many people who eagerly asked me to gaze at the crystal ball. Instead, I bored them by talking about the various factors at play in each constituency. I often pictured myself as standing in the middle of a milling crowd, wet finger in the air. While it obviously helped me laugh at myself, the image also kept me on track.

There were worrying moments, nothing more serious than the time I travelled with Aam Aadmi Party candidate Dayamani Barla and her supporters through the Khunti night after campaigning. I'd broken my own Standard Operating Procedure, which was to not travel with candidates in suspected left wing extremist areas. To add to it all, the People's Liberation Front of India were after Barla: if someone had flicked on the light inside the car, my white knuckles would have been on show. All of which makes Barla's and her supporters' efforts extraordinary. Later, as I traveled to Bihar's villages, I was shocked at the communal divide: people kept telling me it was normal during an election season, but I doubt things will just decide to go back to being the way they were when dawn breaks on May 17.

Hazaribagh, ahead of the Ram Navami procession. A float supposedly depicting Narendra Modi in the middle, outgoing MP Yashwant Sinha to his right and Sinha's son Jayant - the BJP candidate - to his left. I was deeply disturbed by the communalisation on show; that Jayant Sinha, who must have told me at least four times during out 20-minute-meeting that he studied in Harvard, would need something like to win.

There were moments of disgust, too. This section almost exclusively belongs to journalists - the man who asked a senior Jharkhand leader for money in front of me at the Jamshedpur airport, another in Palamu who advised me to ask for "travel expenses" when I meet an outgoing MP. I looked everywhere for Muslim, adivasi, dalit journalists, but found none. Maybe I looked in the wrong places, but what I saw also told me journalists' biases were out in public: I was in Dumka when Giriraj Singh made his go-to-Pakistan speech in adjacent Godda and couldn't find a reporter willing to share the footage. The NDTV clip online was only 43 seconds long and I correctly suspected the BJP would claim it was taken out of context. However, journalists who I knew had access to it refused to divulge contents. The same evening, I flipped regional Hindi channels to discover they were not reporting on the speech. Instead, there was a lot of righteous anger in studios about Nitin Gadkari's reported comments that, "Caste is in Bihar's DNA." Well, duh.

Sadness was everywhere. When Simon Marandi - since fired from the Hemant Soren cabinet - described the decay of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, I was almost moved to tears. Which was weird, because Simon is a particularly foul-mouthed man. I had been working on a speculative story on the end of the JMM in Dumka then. As I would realise, I was late to the party: JMM was already dead in an "End of History" way. It was quite shocking to see Shibu Soren being controlled by the people around him. They weren't letting the poor man talk.

Ram Vilas Bhagat (97) of Hajipur constituency, who says he was abducted an made to submit nomination papers against Ram Vilas Paswan by the local Yadav strongman. 

There was more sadness than anger in Dumka's Sikaripara police station on April 24 night, as news of the death of colleagues in a Maoist attack came in. It would turn to anger overnight, as the realisation that a suspected malicious nature of deployment by the Superintendent of Police himself had meant poorly trained policemen were on duty in high-risk areas. The Times of India's district correspondent Rajesh Pandey suggested we visit the district hospital that night and what I saw there destroyed whatever faith I had left in Jharkhand's leaders.

That the same night should be the source of astounding wonder should be written in the stars. At some point, as the death tolls kept going up, I looked up in frustration. And there they were, the stars. I could not take my eyes away: at some point, I'd forgotten to look at the stars.

Sunflowers, Supaul.
the sunflower/ that scorned lover/ refused to look/ as the sun went behind her back

However, I found time to stop and click the flowers in Bihar's Supaul. Sunflowers, yes - and I guess you can't smell them without being a pollen carrier and sneeze machine yourself - but that was a #win for sure. I guess it took little to make me happy this season. There was the Cherry Berry Ice Stick by Bihar's Sudha, for one. Essentially a rose milk popsicle topped with two cherries, it became a staple. Rose milk means memories, too - it was amma's treat every time we went to the Indian Coffee House in Chinnakkada together. There was the Santhali midnight service for Easter in Dumka, probably the most peaceful Christian service I've attended. Happiness was the realisation in Raxaul, Bihar that Nepal was across the road; happiness was getting to the room each evening to find the jeans had loosened a bit more around my waist.

The absence of election issues in Jharkhand was disturbing. I had this illuminating conversation with an aide to a political leader once. It was night and the young man, also staying at the same hotel, came over to my room. He wanted to know about Kerala. "What are the usual election issues in Kerala?" I didn't get the question, so told him there was no one set of issues all the time; people also look at candidates' performance, etc. He didn't get the point at all. "So whom do the Brahmins vote for?" Everyone, I said. He had got me so pissed, so when he asked, "What do the Brahmins of Kerala eat?" I said beef. Sent him on his way. I wouldn't be surprised if I see him occupy an important position in the state soon.

Bihar was fun. The sight of .303s was a welcome sight, for one: there were no commandos creating a secure perimeter, no need to worry at the sight of a break in the road and get out to check for landmines, no SOPs. On my second morning there, I was in a helicopter with Sharad Yadav. Evening found me in an open jeep with Pappu Yadav. I've written of Sharad Yadav elsewhere, but Pappu was quite, errr, charming. He had his way with people, who were tripping over each other to please him: the man was suffering from diarrhea, but ate from every plate kept before him. Bihar was fun also because of Prakash Jha, who let me tag along for almost a whole day while he campaigned as a JD(U) candidate in Raxaul. There were many anecdotes, many uses of the f-word and the man seemed genuinely interested in having serious political discussions.

I'm starting a Pappu Yadav Fans' Club.

From what I saw of the two states - and I didn't go to the Maoist areas of Bihar, mind you - Jharkhand's election campaign has lost intimacy. This may be largely due to security reasons, but Jharkhand's difficult terrain also has a say: end-to-end, Singhbhum constituency is about 200 km and cannot be physically covered by a candidate in 10 days. In Jharkhand, too many leaders were falling from the sky and there was a disconnect in what they were saying and what people wanted. In hindsight, this was probably one reason why the BJP failed to impose a ""wave" in the state. In Bihar, on the other hand, people seemed to be clued into political rhetoric - all across Muzaffarpur, people were using the metaphor of "roti palatna hai" to mean a change in government at the center and state. I believe this must have come from the BJP; a Narendra Modi speech, most likely.

There was hope in Saranda as the people of Tirilposi voted without having to worry about having their "hands chopped off" as a lot of villagers told me outside the polling booth. I don't really know whether the Maoists chopped off hands in the past for voting, but only a handful of residents had voted in the past 12 years or so. Though of a different kind, there was hope in the Bihar countryside - that Narendra Modi will secure borders, build roads, defeat the Maoists, bring about social change and teach the Muslims a lesson. I really hope the man realises the implications of what he has done.

A pleasant surprise in Muzaffarpur: Rupesh Kumar Kunwar (green jacket), an Independent candidate meets Akshay Verma (marigold garland) on the road. Verma's contesting as the candidate of a party he floated.
"We want good people to win from here. I am supporting you," Kunwar says.

Despite all the places visited, these 45 days were about the people. Journalists and well-wishers who set up meetings and introduced me to their contacts: my Bihar counterpart Santosh Singh, Prakash Pandey in Hazaribagh and Sanjay Soni in Madhepura, to name a few. Sub-editors in Delhi who had to plod through copies when I indulged the writer in me. Candidates who found time to talk despite knowing my reports won't get them even a vote. The people of Jharkhand who continued to be such impeccable hosts. Those in Bihar who became a target of my caste pilgrimages. Strangers in tea shops, village chowks and courtyards who sat down for a confessional - sharing their hopes, fears, even hatred - never knowing they were being conned into being a part of my therapeutic process.

At the end of it all, I now realise there were days when the thought of her didn't cross my mind.