NEW DELHI: Shibu Soren was an avatar to the Santhals of the Chhotanagpur plateau of the undivided Bihar.
They called him Dishom Guru — the god of all 10 directions. In his younger days, his black locks, flowing beard and chiselled features mesmerised the tribals as much as they frustrated the Bihar Police, as he led a movement for tribal rights that saw a separate tribal state of Jharkhand carved from Bihar in his lifetime.
At 81, Soren breathed his last in Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in the national capital from kidney complications on Monday. Called Guruji by now, he became chief minister thrice, never able to complete a full term as politics or police cases disrupted his reign.
He even went to Delhi as minister at the Centre, but as the years dragged on, and the health taking its toll, he hung up his boots and, succumbing to dynasty politics, handed over control of the party he co-founded, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), to his son, Hemant. The younger Soren is the current chief minister of a coalition with the Congress.
Shibu Soren’s legacy is inseparable from the struggle for tribal rights in undivided Bihar. A Santhal, he grew up in an oppressive environment where politicians, landlords and usurers milked tribals of their dignity and displaced them from their hereditary forest dwellings, reducing them to literal slavery.
The angry young man decided to rebel and become the prophet of tribal identity. His target was the “diku”, an outsider in the tribal language. That could mean any of the many oppressors. His demand was for ‘jal, jungle, zameen’, water, forest, land, which the tribals considered their god-given resources.
The movement he birthed thus arose from generations of exploitation, dispossession and deprivation of tribals — he preferred ‘adivasis’ — till in the early 1970s it turned into a political struggle under the banner of the JMM. It was headquartered in the hundreds of tribal villages, the tribal councils deciding agitational agendas, the Santhali folk songs arousing political passions.
Soren nurtured the movement across the land. He would move from village to village on foot. He had nothing he could call his own except the clothes and chappals he wore.
The villagers fed him, listened to him, and obeyed him blindly. He would explain to them facts of life they felt but could not express.
‘His transactions with world outside the tribe changed him and his needs’
He would identify the oppressors—the landlord, his “lathait”, the usurer, the dirty loan accounts register that sealed the fates of lakhs of tribals, the police, the block and district level administrative officials. He would tell him how the development the government in “Dilli” planned never reached them and why. He would finally tell them they should be free to rule their land. The seeds were sown, and a movement was born.
The JMM of his time was as much a political vehicle as it aspired for tribal self-rule and cultural survival. For the Bihar government, the demand for Jharkhand was a breakaway action by the tribals. For Soren, it was a reclamation of tribal homeland and identity.
The 1980s and 1990s saw a string of agitations and protests Soren organised throughout Chhotanagpur, mobilising thousands of tribals to undertake strikes and blockades. He went to jail many a time. His absences only added to his mystique. The tribals began to place his photos next to their forest deities. They would not leave his side till he allowed them to touch his feet and smear the mud from his footprints on their foreheads.
His transactions with the world outside the tribe changed him, his attire, his food and his needs. He learnt a smattering of English phrases as well. But some things remained at the core – his soft, mellow voice, his magnetic stare, the arresting baritone and beyond all, his tribal identity. At heart, he was always that small Santhali from Nemra in Bihar’s Ramgarh.