Ranchi: The high-pitched campaigns for Tuesday’s bypolls in Dumka and Bermo came to an end at 5pm on Sunday, signalling the start of the silence period till the voting day in both the constituencies. While the JMM-Congress-RJD coalition government, which already has 50 MLAs in the 81-member state assembly, is looking at stability in the House, BJP, which has threatened to “topple the government” after the bypolls, is trying to regain its lost ground.
Both Dumka and Bermo are legacy seats for the ruling alliance. However, stakes are higher in Dumka, a seat reserved for Scheduled Tribes and considered a stronghold of JMM. Chief minister Hemant Soren’s brother Basant is making his electoral debut from this seat while BJP has pitted its ex-MLA and former minister Lois Marandi, who lost to Hemant in December, against him.
Hemant vacated Dumka and retained Barhait, necessitating a bye-election. In Bermo, Congress is banking on Kumar Jaimangal, son of former MLA Rajendra Prasad Singh, who died in May this year. Here, BJP has fielded yet another old warhorse of the party — Yogeshwar Mahto Batul — who, too, lost his seat in the last election.
With two days left for the voting, both the camps claimed that the tide is in their favour. JMM’s working president and chief minister Hemant said he is extremely confident for a rerun of the 2019 results. “There is no doubt about the outcome of both the seats. We will win Dumka and Bermo with good margins because of the good works of the government in the last 10 months,” Soren said while speaking to reporters in Dumka before flying back to Ranchi. Hemant had spent days camping in the state’s sub-capital to lead the campaign trail.
Congress, on the other hand, took up flash-campaigns by pressing different teams led by its MLAs across Bermo through roadshows and pocket-sized rallies to consolidate its strength. State Congress president Rameshwar Oraon held about half-a-dozen small rallies in Bermo as part of his public-connect programme while agriculture minister Badal Patralekh followed suit in Bokaro thermal area.
Congress spokesperson Alok Dubey said, “The results are a foregone conclusion for us. We don’t have any doubts about our victory and all that is to be seen is the winning margin.” Another spokesperson, Lal Kishorenath Shahdeo, said their focus will now shift towards effective booth management from Monday. “We have appointed booth-level teams and given them tasks to ensure maximum turnout at each booth on the voting day. The key is to strengthen the booth committees through effective coordination so that no glitches occur. Half-a-dozen MLAs and senior party workers have been assigned over clusters to oversee the polling affairs,” he added.
Meanwhile, BJP, which is fighting the bypolls with a renewed vigour after bringing back its old allies, Ajsu-P and JD(U) into the NDA fold, is largely banking on the perceived anti-incumbency in the current regime along with the persona of Babulal Marandi, Jharkhand’s first chief minister and its strongest tribal face, to work in its favour.
For Marandi, these polls will be a test of his leadership of the BJP's legislative party, a post he was given soon after he returned to the saffron camp. Marandi had vowed never to return to BJP but took a U-turn after over a decade and his “ghar wapasi” took place when he merged his erstwhile JVM-P with BJP. On Sunday, he held roadshows in favour of Lois Marandi in Dalia Masaliya and Dumka to target both urban and rural voters.
State BJP president Deepak Prakash said “anti-government sentiments” have already started to creep in because of the lack of governance and lawlessness in the state since the formation of the alliance government.
“As we have been saying, this bypolls will decide the future political course in the state. In both the seats, BJP will get a landslide mandate as people are fed up with this government in such a brief period because of the utter lawlessness and the lack of governance,” Prakash claimed.