Raipur: Chhattisgarh’s tribal politics, which has largely been a bipolar affair in the state’s 23 years, is seeing the emergence of a new player riding high on its performance in last year’s Bhanupratappur bypoll.
An Independent candidate backed by the Sarva Advisasi Samaj Sangathan (SASS), a platform comprising retired officers from the IPS, IAS and IRS, as well as state civil services, got 16 percent of the vote in the December 2022 byelection.
Former Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Akbar Ram Korram bagged the third position in the election, which was won by the Congress.
The SASS is now looking to make its presence felt on a larger scale, with an aim to back candidates in 50 of the state’s 90 assembly seats in the year-end election.
Apart from the 29 tribal-reserved seats, the outfit is eyeing around 20 general seats where the Scheduled Tribes (STs) account for 20,000-40,000 of the population.
Former MP Arvind Netam, who has served as a minister in the governments led by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, leads the SASS.
Speaking to ThePrint, Netam said Chhattisgarh’s tribal politics had become “directionless” over the past 23 years.
“The tribal who was fighting the BJP for 15 years for water, forest, land laws and PESA has been cheated,” he said, referring to the state’s Congress government led by Bhupesh Baghel, and the rules it enacted under the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act.
“PESA was implemented, but its language was changed. For the use or acquisition of tribals’ water, forest or land, the PESA provided for ‘permission’ to be taken from the gram sabha,” he added. “However, while implementing it, the state government changed the word ‘permission’ to ‘consultation’, thus cheating the tribals,” he added.
Tribal politics
Chhattisgarh has a population of 2.75 crore, of which 34 per cent are tribals.
Apart from the 29 seats reserved for tribals, members of the community also contest from two other seats where they form the majority.
In the 2018 assembly election, the Congress won 28 tribal seats.
Meanwhile, at the Lok Sabha level, 4 of the state’s 11 seats — Bastar, Kanker, Raigarh and Surguja — are reserved for STs. The Congress won just Bastar in 2019, with the remaining 3 going to the BJP.
Surguja MP Renuka Singh is the Union Minister of State for Tribal Affairs.
As chief minister, Baghel has been attempting an intense tribal outreach. Soon after he was sworn in, he returned to the tribals 1000s of acres of land that the state government acquired for a proposed Tata Steel project that never saw the light of day.
Apart from this, the government increased the support price for paddy. It also increased the support price for forest produce, while setting up a market for it and arranging for its purchase by the state government.
According to former election official and political analyst Sushil Kumar Trivedi, since the days of undivided Madhya Pradesh — from which Chhattisgarh was formed — there has politically only been a demand for a tribal chief minister.
However, in the name of tribals’ social and economic upliftment, big tribal leaders’ families have continued to flourish and the same is happening now, he added.
Mahesh Gagda, a former minister and state BJP leader from Bastar, disagreed. If the tribals were not politically awakened, he said, the bureaucracy would not have been inclined in their direction.
He then said no one from his own family was in politics, but he had still become an MLA and minister.
Both the major political parties, he said, had retired IAS, IPS and officers from other services as MLAs. “Recently, another IAS officer resigned to contest elections. That’s why it would not be right to say that the edge of tribal politics has become blunt,” he added.
The Jogi factor
The tribal-reserved assembly seats are largely concentrated in two of the state’s 5 administrative divisions: Surguja (14) and Bastar (12).
In 2000, when Ajit Jogi became chief minister of Chhattisgarh, he contested and won the byelection from the tribal-reserved Marwahi assembly seat after declaring himself a tribal in the documents.
At that time, Nand Kumar Sai, who was a strong tribal leader of Surguja division, was made the leader of the opposition in the Chhattisgarh assembly by the BJP.
In an attempt to consolidate the BJP’s presence among the tribals, Sai set out to question Jogi’s tribal identity.
This appeared to work for the BJP.
In the three consecutive elections it won in 2003, 2008 and 2013, the BJP performed brilliantly in tribal areas.
In 2003, the BJP got 25 tribal seats — 11 in Bastar and 14 in Surguja. In 2008, it got 19 tribal seats — 11 in Bastar and 8 in Surguja. In the next election, it won 11 seats — 5 in Bastar and 6 in Surguja.
However, when Jogi — later declared non-tribal by a government committee, a decision challenged in court — parted ways with the Congress in 2016, the party’s fortunes appeared to change.
In 2018, the tribals voted heavily for the Congress, leading it to its best performance in ST-reserved seats since pre-bifurcation days.
Nand Kumar Sai, who shifted from the BJP to the Congress in May, told ThePrint that there is a practice in the BJP of “using tribals as fronts”.
“This is what happened to me for 23 years,” he added.
He noted that a tribal woman (Droupadi Murmu) was made President, and the decision was promoted all over the country as a mark of respect for tribals.
“However, when time came for the inauguration of the new Parliament House, the President was not even invited to inaugurate it,” he said. “What would you call this?”
An earlier version of the report said former DIG Akbar Ram Korram bagged the second position in the December 2022 bypoll. He came third.
The writer is a senior journalist
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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