Mukulika Banerjee , Manisha Priyam: The Pathalgadi Movement and Jharkhand Elections 2019

By Dilip -
The Pathalgadi movement of Jharkhand drew on Munda traditions to fashion the 2019 electoral defeat of the incumbent party. A unique interplay of an assertion of constitutional rights, local sovereignty and social practices made this a special moment.

In December 2019, in elections to the Jharkhand Assembly, a coalition of parties under the leadership of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) party won, defeating the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government led by Raghubar Das. The very first decision taken by the new chief minister, Hemant Soren, was to withdraw all the cases registered against the protestors involved in the Pathalgadi movement against the previous government’s amendment of the special laws that protected tribal rights to land. The withdrawal was a small victory and brought an important phase of the Pathalgadi movement to a resolution.


This was a moment in India’s political history when electoral change brought gains for a social movement. Such electoral victories for relatively localised social movements, especially against land dispossession, are a rare phenomenon in Indian politics. In the case of Jharkhand, previous writing has drawn attention to the distinctions that Munda communities hold between the state, democratic processes, and politics; and how elections are sometimes used to ‘keep the state away’ (Shah 2007).

The history of politics in this region also demonstrates that Adivasi communities have always utilised multiple pathways into the electoral system, shifting allegiances across political parties strategically. In December 2019, a confluence of issues, prior mobilisation, the momentum of a two-year-old social movement, and the scale of the state assembly contest produced another iteration of the relationship between the state, elections, and the Constitution of India that takes our understanding of contemporary politics further.....
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/margins-and-marginality

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