Jharkhand: Of rich men and poor people

Hockey: the unfulfilled promise

Even as neighbouring Odisha appears to have stolen a march over Jharkhand in producing hockey players, the sport remains equally popular in Khunti, Simdega and Gumla districts. Inter-village tournaments — with a fat goat as the prize — have continued to be popular for the past half a century or more. It is a common sight to see schoolchildren with improvised hockey sticks alongside their school bags.

Since the creation of the state in 2000, hockey stadia with astroturf and coaching centres have come up in every district.

Hockey players still recall the heroics of the Khunti SS High School boys who defeated the combined West German schoolboys’ team in the late 1970s in the final of the Nehru Cup hockey tournament for juniors. For years the schoolboys were employed by the BSF (Border Security Force), the army, the Railways and other governmental agencies for their hockey skills — and placed in low-skill jobs at the entry level. Many of them could never finish their schooling and retired early or burnt out.

Since then, the girls have grabbed most of the opportunities, edging out the boys. The senior Indian women’s hockey team has star players like Sangeeta Kumari, Beauty Dungdung and Olympian Salima Tete from Simdega district alone. The national under-21 team has Salima’s younger sister Mahima Tete, Ropani Kumari and Deepika Soreng, again from this same district.

Athletics, hockey, football and volleyball have been the sports most popular among the Adivasi children and youth. The state does not, however, appear to have played to its full potential. Could it be due to a certain M.S. Dhoni from Ranchi, who caught the imagination of the youth and weaned them — and sponsors and officialdom — over to cricket?

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Too poor, too many trafficked

The first National Multidimensional Poverty Index (NMPI) released by NITI Ayog in 2021 reported that 42.2 per cent people in Jharkhand were living in multidimensional poverty. The index placed Bihar at the top of the poverty table, Jharkhand second. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) also shows that Jharkhand is among the 10 states where human trafficking is most rampant.

Migration of people from rural areas to cities continues unabated. Similarly, migration of people to other states for employment appears to be growing. Maids and household workers from Jharkhand are in great demand in the National Capital region (Delhi NCR); but many of them are badly treated, even tortured or sexually exploited. Some have been literally sold into ‘service’. This is not a new phenomenon, but employment opportunities are still inadequate in the state for both the educated and the less educated.

Paradoxically, because of better education, a large number of tribal youth have been doing better than before, joining professions like banking, financial services, the telecom sector and the administration. They have also become pilots and have joined the foreign service. They have not, strangely, been as successful in sports, despite being very good (thanks to either their genetics or lifestyles).

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Dhiraj Sahu in the news

Odisha and Jharkhand may not have gold deposits (Jharkhand does have a gold mine, but the recovery of gold from the sands of the Subarnarekha river has always been reported to be meagre), but the two states have been goldmines for miners.

Indeed, barely 10 years ago, the topmost income-tax payers in the country were not the Ambanis or the Adanis. They were one Mr Ahluwalia and one Mrs Patnaik, both owners of iron-ore mines in Odisha. At the turn of the century, when Jharkhand was formed, the mining town of Barbil in Odisha alone had more BMWs than the entire state of Jharkhand.

Though not a major mining baron, Rajya Sabha MP Dhiraj Sahu of the Congress has recently found himself in the news, with visuals doing the rounds on TV and on social media of the Rs 350 crore in cash recovered from his offices, residence, distilleries and the homes of his employees.

Now, while the prime minister and his retinue were prompt in pointing fingers at Sahu, Modi was silent in 2021 when cash worth Rs 250 crore was recovered from an obscure businessman dealing in perfume from Kanauj, Uttar Pradesh. The prime minister was also silent about the sting videos in which a son of his former cabinet colleague Narendra Singh Tomar, now speaker of the Madhya Pradesh assembly, was heard finalising deals worth Rs 1,000 crore to buy land in Canada to cultivate marijuana.

The sorely pilloried Sahu himself said in a video interview to ANI that he was confident of accounting for every rupee recovered from him and his by the income tax department. His extended family, he explained, had been in the liquor trade for 100 years in the states of Odisha and Jharkhand and that trade is largely carried out in cash.

While the party has carefully stood apart from the MP and has made it known that Sahu alone can explain the source of the cash, a Jharkhand Congress spokesperson told the media that the annual turnover of his family businesses would be in the region of Rs 10,000 crore. Nothing nefarious there, surely? 

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Poor state, rich rulers

The state of Jharkhand is no stranger to cash and corruption, of course. Madhu Koda, who was in the BJP and a minister in the cabinets of both Babulal Marandi and Arjun Munda before becoming an independent MLA, headed a coalition government of the UPA. That did not prevent him from getting arrested in 2009 on charges of generating Rs 4,000 crore for himself and his cronies. He was, however, convicted in a coal allocation scam in 2017 and sentenced to three years in prison.

Another minister from that time, Enos Ekka, also went to jail after being implicated in corruption cases. Ekka, who was a small-time vegetable vendor before getting into politics, is known for his lavish lifestyle. Famously, he once invited people from a hundred or more villages to his son’s birthday party, and had hundreds of goats slaughtered to feed the guests.

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Clean ‘bonds’

The first chief minister of the state, Babulal Marandi, is known as a relatively honest politician. In a state where several former bureaucrats, including two chief secretaries, a district magistrate and several secretary-level officers are currently in jail on corruption charges, it was no surprise when Marandi’s critics named him Babulal ‘Marwari’.

His fondness for the good things in life and his friendships with businessmen were responsible for the sobriquet. In an unguarded moment, though, he had once blurted out that as chief minister, he was regularly summoned to bankroll the party and transport cash. With electoral bonds in play now, of course, BJP chief ministers perhaps no longer have to run such errands and embarrass or implicate themselves.