February 23, 1998

Dumka  Bihar
Electorate: 9.5 lakh
Main Rival: B L Marandi (BJP)

Shibu Soren has this habit. About 10 minutes after the car starts, his eyes glaze over, his head drops and he drifts into snoozeland. Stop, and it all changes. The eyes snap open, they are on fire, and so is he. "We'll show them," snorts the battle-scarred 57-year-old. "We should have been finished after what happened, but we're alive and we'll come back.

"He'll have to. JMM(S) is in a shambles, so badly buffeted by the MP bribery scandal that the Lok Sabha count is down from six to one: him. The party's raison d'être of a separate homeland, Jharkhand, is now echoed by all parties. But the self-styled dishum guru, or greatest leader of Chhotanagpur tribals, still gets a chieftain's welcome at a rally in Chakradharpur. He paints the bribery charges as a lie, rails about parties which "don't belong" there, like the BJP and the Congress, and says nobody knows the tribals' plight better than he. "He just has to tell us what to do, and we'll do it," says Birsa Munda, a firebrand from Sonua. The hotheads finally cool off when the jokes begin to fly about how a Congressman went flying from the rotor wash of Sonia Gandhi's chopper. Guffaws. Soren is there, with them, one of them. And as he heads back to Dumka, he's surely hoping this time the joke isn't on him.

--Sudeep Chakravarti

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