New Delhi: Former Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) MLA and daughter-in-law of party patriarch Shibu Soren, Sita Soren, who contested on a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ticket this election is leading by 3,760 votes in Jharkhand’s Dumka.
JMM veteran Nalin Soren, who is also a founding member of the party, is trailing.
Dumka has been a JMM bastion with Shibu Soren having won his first Lok Sabha election from Dumka in 1980 and winning the seat several times since then. However, in the 2019 polls, BJP’s Sunil Soren defeated Shibu Soren by 47,590 votes.
The seat saw a prestige battle of sorts because Dumka is also the erstwhile electoral bastion of BJP’s Jharkhand President Babulal Marandi, who beat Shibu Soren in the 1998 elections to win the Dumka seat.
In 1999, Marandi retained the Dumka seat by defeating Shibu Soren’swife Rupi Soren.
With Shibu Soren’s daughter-in-law Sita Soren contesting on a BJP ticket, the constituency witnessed a Soren vs Soren battle, becoming a fight for dominance between the JMM and the BJP, as well as a family battleground for the Soren family.
Sita Soren, who was the general secretary of JMM, joined the BJP in March this year, days after her sister-in-law, Kalpana Soren, filed her nomination as the JMM candidate for the Gandey assembly bypolls. Sita Soren has been a three-time JMM MLA from the Jama assemblysegment in the Dumka LS constituency.
“Matter of morality for me,” Sita Soren was quoted as saying by the media after she joined the BJP in Delhi.
In her resignation letter addressed to JMM supremo and her father-in-law, Shibu Soren, Sita Soren alleged that after the demise of her husband, Durga Soren, she and her family had been “victims of continuous neglect”.
“We have been isolated by the party and family members, which has been extremely painful for me. I had hoped that the situation would improve with time, but unfortunately, it didn’t happen,” her resignation letter said, according to media reports.
This led to a public spat between Kalpana and Sita Siren. Kalpana then took to social media to express her displeasure. On 20 March, she posted on X, “Jharkhand ke DNA me nahi hai jhuk jana (Bowing down is not in the DNA of anyone, who is from Jharkhand)”. She spoke of Durga Soren, asserting that he was a father figure to her husband.
In response, Sita Soren cautioned those “shedding crocodile tears in the name of her husband”, adding, “If my children and I children expose the horrific truth, the political dreams of several people will be shattered. The people of Jharkhand will spit in the name of those who conspired to eliminate Durga Soren and his people.”