New Delhi: Chief Minister Champai Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) government in Jharkhand won the trust vote on Monday 47-29 in the 81-member Assembly.
The government was formed last week after former chief minister Hemant Soren resigned and was then subsequently arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in a money-laundering case.
The jailed leader was allowed by a court to participate in the vote of confidence, the result of which reinstated the ruling JMM-led alliance back in power. The other members in the coalition are the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).
Soon after Soren’s resignation last week, JMM legislature party leader Champai Soren urged Governor C.P. Radhakrishnan to accept his claim to form the government at the earliest, citing “confusion” in the state as it was without a chief minister.
He was sworn in on 2 February. The 67-year-old tribal leader became the 12th chief minister of the state, and the sixth from Jharkhand’s Kolhan region which comprises East Singhbhum, West Singhbhum and Seraikela-Kharsawan districts..
Senior Congress leader Alamgir Alam and RJD leader Satyanand Bhokta also took oath as state ministers. The Governor then allowed Soren 10 days to prove his majority in the House.
Incidentally, 38 legislators had been flown to Hyderabad in Congress-ruled Telangana last Friday amid fears that the opposition BJP would poach them. The MLAs came back Sunday evening.
In the discussion preceding the trust vote on Monday, Champai Soren said the BJP had tried to destabilise the “democratically-elected” Jharkhand government and used central agencies to frame Hemant Soren.
On his part, Hemant Soren accused the Raj Bhavan of being instrumental in the conspiracy to arrest him, terming the day of his arrest – 31 January – as “a black chapter in India’s history”. He also said the BJP did not want a tribal chief minister to complete five years in Jharkhand, adding “they did not allow this in its regimes”. Soren became the chief minister in 2019.