Month: November 2019

Bihar: Woman accuses ex-RJD MP’s son of sexual harassment on pretext of marriage.

Source – indiatoday.in

A woman has accused former Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MP, Vijay Yadav’s son of sexual harassment and fraud of Rs 13 lakh on the pretext of marriage.

The victim has lodged a complaint against Vishwajit Yadav in Gardnibagh women police station in Patna.

In her complaint, the victim claimed that she became friends with Vishwajit Yadav and gradually it turned into love. Following which, the accused had promised to marry her and sexually abused her. She further claimed that the accused took Rs 13 lakh from her as a loan, which he had not returned yet.

“When my parents learned about our bond, they agreed to our marriage. A flat was booked. I have shown details to everyone. When our marriage was broke down due to some reason, he started torturing me mentally,” the victim said.

The complainant claimed that the accused has cheated her and now he is getting married to another girl on November 22.

The victim further claimed that she had appealed President Ram Nath Kovind to help her in the whole matter and asked for protection of her and the family.

The victim said that she had approached the women’s commission in January 2019 but nobody paid attention to her complaint as it is the high-profile case.

“A petition has been filed in the court as the accused beaten my father. I was even forced to close the case. I have also filed a case of attempt to murder against the accused,” the victim said.

Speaking about the alleged matter, station in-charge of women police station Aarti Jaiswal said, “A case will be registered. The accused was called twice but he did not turn up as he had a pre-wedding ceremony at home.”

The victim in her complaint has mentioned that she went to the house of the accused on his pre-wedding ceremony. “However, the family of Vishwajit thrashed her. Later, she sat on a dharna outside the office of the superintendent of the police in Patna,” the complaint reads.

Liquor mafia attacks police in Bihar, 3 injured.

Source – indiatoday.in

The police and officials of excise were attacked by a liquor mafia in the Vaishali district of Bihar on Tuesday.

The violent incident happened when the police and excise officials were carrying out raids on liquor mafia in the district.

The incident left three police personnel injured.

According to the police, acting on a tip-off from the police headquarters, a team of police and excise officials raided Karanpura village under Ganga Bridge police station in Vaishali district.

During the raid the police found illegal manufacturing of liquor taking place in the village. The officials immediately seized the illicit liquor and arrested two smugglers from the spot.

While the officials were in the process of taking the arrested smugglers, they were attacked by the liquor mafia and local villagers.

Several police vehicles were damaged in the incident leaving three police personnel including a female grievously injured.

The attackers also freed the arrested smugglers from the police after which they escaped.

The police and the excise team had to withdraw from the spot after which the injured was rushed to Civil Hospital in Hajipur.

“The police team had gone to carry out trade in Karanpura village on the basis of information received that manufacturing of illicit liquor was taking place. It was then when the villagers attacked the raiding team and freed two accused. We are registering an FIR in this case and carrying out investigations,” Raghav Dayal, DSP Sadar Hajipur, said.

BSEB Dummy Admit Card 2020: Last date to submit corrections extended to November 25.

Source – news.aglasem.com

As per reports in leading dailies of the state, Bihar School Examination Board that is BSEB has extended the last date for schools to submit corrections in the second dummy admit card 2020 to November 25, 2019. Previously, the deadline was November 20, 2019. 

Although print notification about the date extension is not visible on the website, however the links to download dummy admit card are still active. It may be noted that students can only download the document and submit corrections to their schools, it is ultimately the responsibility of the head of institutions to ensure that corrections get submitted through the proper channel at biharboard.online, and bsebinteredu.in.

Reports further suggest that the board has extended the last date to submit fees of those candidates whose fees have not been submitted until now. The board has uploaded list of un-paid candidates for annual exam on the official websites. Such students should coordinate with their institutions to take the matter forward. 

BSEB has also released matric  and inter exam date sheets. Matric refers to class 10, and inter to class 12. 

As per the Bihar board 10th routine 2020, science exam will be held on February 17, 2020. Then mathematics will be held on February 18, 2020. Social science exam will be organized on February 19, 2020. English paper shall be held on February 20, 2020. Hindi, urdu, bengali, maithili language exam papers will be held on February 21, 2020. The test for second language has been scheduled for February 22, 2020. The last exam will be for optional subject, on February 24, 2020. 

On all the dates for Matric exams, there will be two shifts. Wherein first shift will be from 9.30 am to 12.15 pm. Whereas second will be from 1.45 pm to 5 pm. 

Bihar board 12th time table 2020 says that physics, history, RB hindi papers will be held on February 3, 2020. Then chemistry, political science, english shall be on February 4, 2020, biology, economics, foundation course exams will be held on February 5, 2020. Then NRB, computer science, multimedia and web technology, yoga and physical education exams will be held on February 6, 2020. 

Mathematics, MB, vocational trade I exams will be held on February 7, 2020. Then on February 8, 2020 will be the exams of agriculture, music, entrepreneurship, geography. Language subject, psychology, vocational trade II papers will be on February 10, 2020. February 11, 2020 is for NRB, philosophy, vocational trade III. Language subject, sociology, business studies, related subjects is on February 12, 2020. And the last exam date shall be February 13, 2020, for home science, economics, MB, accountancy.

In the exam date sheet, NRB means non rashtriya bhasha, RB means rashtriya bhasha, and MB means matriya bhasha.

Students should carry the officially issued Bihar board admit card 2020, not the dummy admit card, on the day of exam. The final admit card will have the final data as entered by students and schools after this correction segment.


IBPS Clerk Prelims Admit Card 2019 to release soon: Check Expected Questions/Topics of Reasoning Ability.

Source – jagranjosh.com

IBPS Clerk Prelims Admit Card 2019 to release soon at ibps.in. Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS) will be releasing the Call Letter for CRP – Clerks -IX Prelims soon. The IBPS Clerk Prelims 2019 exam will be held on 7 – 8 December 2019 and on 14 – 15 December 2019. With just a few days left for the Preliminary exam, it is suggested that the candidates should focus on practice and revision. This is the right time to be devoted to the practice of each topic individually.

In IBPS Clerk Prelims, questions will be asked from Numerical Ability, Reasoning Ability and English Language. The questions asked in the Reasoning Ability section mostly cover topics like verbal reasoning, brainteasers, puzzles and other miscellaneous topics. Check below the important topics from the Reasoning Ability Section that are highly expected to be asked in the IBPS Clerk Prelims 2019 exam.

Brush up your verbal and non-verbal reasoning skills by undertaking the practice of the given Reasoning Ability Topics and ace the IBPS Clerk examination. First, have a look at the detailed exam pattern of the IBPS Clerk preliminary examination.

– IBPS Clerk Prelims exam will be conducted online

– Questions will be asked in objective MCQ format

– 100 MCQs will be asked from Reasoning Ability, Numerical Ability & English

– Negative Marking: 1/4th of the total marks will be deducted as penalty for every wrong answer

– There will be sectional timing of 20 minutes for each section

Jharkhand Asembly Election 2019: Now, Bihar Ally JD(U) Expresses Support For BJP ‘Rebel’ Saryu Rai.

Source – india.com

New Delhi: The BJP, which is witnessing strained ties with allies in Maharashtra and poll-bound Jharkhand, was left with more questions on Tuesday as it ally in Bihar, the ruling Janata Dal (United), openly expressed its support for anti-corruption crusader and former Jharkhand minister Saryu Rai, who will contest as an independent candidate against Chief Minister Raghubar Das from Jamshedpur East.

Rai had, on Saturday, resigned as MLA and minister after the BJP denied him ticket to contest the upcoming five-phase Assembly polls.

Speaking at a press conference in state capital Ranchi, Rajiv Ranjan, the JD(U)’s Lok Sabha MP, indicated that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, a college mate of Saryu Rai, might even personally campaign for him. “Saryu Rai has always fought against corruption, and even as a minister in the Jharkhand government, consistently raised his voice against corruption over the last five years,” he said.

“Since he launched a crusade against corruption, he was denied ticket by the BJP. He will now fight a symbolic battle against CM Raghubar Das, and we, the JD(U), welcome and support his stand. If Saryu Rai requests, we will urge Nitish ji to campaign for him,” Rajiv Ranjan added.

Rai is famous for exposing many scams in undivided Bihar as well as in Jharkhand after its formation, after being carved out of Bihar.

Congress has fielded its national spokesperson Gourav Vallabh from Jamshedpur East.

Votes for the 81-seat Jharkhand Assembly will be cast on November 30, December 7, 12, 16 and 20. The result will be announced on December 23.

Bihar, meanwhile, will go to polls next year.

Lok Sabha question: Uttar Pradesh tops chart in PDS corruption, Bihar 2nd, Delhi 3rd.

Source – cnbctv18.com

As many as 807 complaints of corruption in the public distribution system (PDS) were received across the country till October 31, 2019, of which Uttar Pradesh reported maximum number of complaints, Union Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Raosaheb Danve-Patil has said.

In a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, the Union Minister said that UP has topped the list in PDS corruption cases with 328 complaints, while Bihar comes next with 108 complaints.

Significantly, UP has hit the headlines many times earlier for PDS scams. In 2014, a Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to investigate the land of the then cabinet minister of the state, Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya, in a multi-crore food grains scam in the state.

Ravi Kishan, MP from Gorakhpur and Dr Ramshankar Katheria, MP from Agra sought details of these complaints as well as the steps taken to curb it.

Delhi ranks third in corruption cases in PDS with 78 complaints been received. Whereas West Bengal has received 48 complaints in such cases.

However, the states from which no complaints have been received include Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Sikkim. Apart from this, no complaints have also been received from the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadar Nagar Haveli and Lakshadweep.

The minister said that for the offence of violation of the provisions of the PDS (Control) Order 2015, there is a provision of punitive action under the Essential Commodities Act 1955. Under this order, the state and union territory have the power to take punitive action.

At the same time, to make the system more transparent under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013, an institutional arrangement for monitoring it has been done by vigilance committee, District Grievance Redressal Officers, State Food Commission.The minister said that to improve the public distribution system, the ministry is computerising the PDS operation in collaboration with all states and union territories. Under this scheme, supply-chain management is being computerised by digitising ration cards/beneficiaries and efforts are being made to bring transparency in it, besides, the ration shops will be automated using electronic point of sale (e-POS) devices.

Spl court issues production warrant againt Lalu in defamation case.

Source – in.news.yahoo.com

A special court here has issued a production warrant against RJD chief Lalu Prasad, who is lodged in a jail in Ranchi, in connection with a defamation case.

Special MP/MLA court judge Kumar Abhinav on Monday issued the production warrant against Prasad in the case filed by Uday Kant Mishra, a member of Bihar State Disaster Management Authority, for making objectionable comments against him.

The court asked the authorities of Birsa Munda jail in Ranchi to produce Prasad before it on December 2, 2019, which is the next date of hearing in the case, Mishra’s counsel V S Dubey told PTI.

The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo is in the high security jail following his conviction in several fodder scam cases.

The court on Monday issued fresh production warrant against Prasad as he could not be produced before it via video conferencing, Dubey said.

The authorities of Birsa Munda jail had earlier told the court that Prasad could be produced before it through video conferencing as his health condition was not good.

Prasad and his son Tejashwi had mentioned Mishra’s name in reference to the Srijan scam publicly during a rally at Bhagalpur in 2017.

The multi-crore Srijan scam is related to fraudulent transfer of government money into the account of a Bhagalpur-based NGO and the CBI is investigating it. Srijan is a registered society for women in small income-generating activities.

They had also alleged that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar regularly visited Mishra’s house whenever he came to Bhagalpur even though he had the facility to stay at the circuit house, Dubey said in his complaint.

Terming the utterances of the father-son duo as defamatory, Mishra had first sent legal notices against them demanding unconditional apology for their objectionable comments, Dubey said.

Later, Mishra proceeded against Prasad and decided not to move ahead against Tejashwi in the case.

Spirited fightbacks and BJP’s vulnerabilities in states.

Source – tribuneindia.com

The BJP is engaged in a two-pronged ideological project that seeks to assert Hindu hegemony as much as it works to make one leader the unquestioned authority over much of India. At the national level, the BJP, led by Narendra Modi, prevailed quite magnificently in the General Election earlier this year. But as we are yet to have that much-promoted ‘one nation, one poll’, the states continue to throw up challenges for the BJP. 

First, there is the problem of plenty and the consequence of initiating growth at the expense of traditional allies. That is what really lies at the heart of the Shiv Sena breaking free of the BJP and attempting another arrangement with the NCP and Congress. The current Modi-Shah-led BJP has a very different approach to coalitions and allies than the Vajpayee-led arrangement that ruled from 1998 to 2004. In its current avatar, the BJP diminishes the regional parties and takes over their space. Once the senior partner in the Maharashtra arrangement, the Sena has had to live with diminishing clout and the fear of losing its USP. A consequence of the Sena departure from the NDA is that a section of the BJP now believes it should have fought on every seat in Maharashtra and given no space to the regional party to play its games. Soon after the Maharashtra verdict, the BJP played hardball with its ally in Jharkhand, the All-Jharkhand Students’ Union (AJSU) and refused to agree to its seat demands for state elections that will take place in five phases starting on November 30. The AJSU is now contesting on its own. 

The question now is whether this psychological approach will extend to Bihar, where the BJP is in government with Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) and where elections take place exactly a year from now.First, let us recall that the current state government is technically forged against the mandate that was given to the grand alliance of Nitish and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD in 2015. It was that pairing that had given rise to the idea of a mahagathbandhan that has currently been discredited. Although Home Minister Amit Shah has stated that the Bihar elections will be fought under the leadership of Nitish Kumar, the BJP has actually been covertly working in the state with certain elements of the RJD to clip Nitish’s wings. There is a push-pull happening in Bihar and given what’s happened in Maharashtra, the BJP would want to safeguard its investment and back a weakened Nitish who could subsequently be dumped. In another strange twist in the world of NDA allies, the JD(U) has announced it will be fighting every seat in Jharkhand on its own even as the party continues to refuse to join the Modi government at the Centre.       

Secondly, the BJP would also need to rework its recent approach to “social engineering”, a term put into usage by one-time RSS ideologue KN Govindacharya, who had worked as organisation secretary of the BJP at a critical time in the party’s growth. After the 2014 win of Narendra Modi, the BJP went against conventional caste and community parameters in choosing leadership for the states. 

In the two states that have most recently voted, Haryana and Maharashtra, and where the BJP’s performance was underwhelming, the party had rather courageously gone against the dominant caste syndrome. This essentially means that they selected chief ministers that did not come from social groups that have traditionally wielded power in these states. It was all supposed to be going smoothly and had the BJP won, the party would have been credited with reinventing the wheel. 

But as it turned out, the dominant castes struck back in both states. In Haryana, the BJP’s social coalition was essentially an anti-Jat rainbow, but the party failed to win a majority. To form the government, it had to turn to a 31-year-old Jat leader, Dushyant Chautala, from a political dynasty and make him the Deputy Chief Minister of the state. In Haryana, the strong re-emergence of the Congress too was largely due to the Jat leadership of a former Chief Minister. 

Similarly, in Maharashtra, now under President’s rule, the old political warhorse, NCP leader Sharad Pawar, made much of his campaign about injured Maratha pride — the traditional ruling community of the state that had been restive through much of the reign of Brahmin Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. 

In Jharkhand, too, the BJP had gone against the convention of having an Adivasi Chief Minister in a state that was supposedly created for the tribals that make up 27 per cent of the population. The state formed on November 15, 2000, had had only Adivasi chief ministers till December 27, 2014, when Raghubar Das from a backward caste became Chief Minister. Still, the dominant caste syndrome would not apply here in the same manner as it did in Haryana and Maharashtra as Jats and Marathas have economic and muscle power, unlike the tribals. 

Given the BJP’s disappointing performance in the last round of Assembly polls, the party will be waiting to see if the JMM-Congress-RJD alliance that is projecting tribal leader Hemant Soren as the CM, would make a breakthrough. If it does, then the case for arithmetical alliances by the opposition will get strengthened again. Soren has described the BJP as a “sinking ship”, but is it so? Internal surveys convince the BJP that going it alone could be the best option (CSDS data for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls shows that the BJP got 64 per cent of the Hindu vote in Jharkhand).

Third, there is now the question of the BJP’s ability to absorb defectors from other parties, a situation that is playing out most visibly in Karnataka, where the BJP got a government after orchestrating absenteeism from 17 members of the preceding Congress-JD (S) coalition. The SC, in a controversial order, has now allowed these legislators to contest elections, but they had originally fought against BJP candidates, so that is creating local-level problems. Besides, the Karnataka defectors and the BJP would be worried by the results of polls in Maharashtra, Haryana and some byelections where party-hoppers were mostly defeated.

For all its apparent might, therefore, the BJP does have vulnerabilities in the states. On the one hand, the Modi persona and an enhanced Hindu identity appear to be the gifts that keep giving results. Yet, state contests show local divergences and sudden islands of spirited fightbacks that do not always go according to the script that is planned, promoted and executed with might and money. 

Is BJP a reliable ally? A look at its alliance politics beyond Maharashtra logjam.

Source – indiatoday.in

I am not a BJP wala. I do not lie. With these words, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray parted ways with the BJP earlier this month asserting that the leading NDA partner is not trustworthy. The Shiv Sena leaders have referred to the troublesome relation of the BJP with alliance partners in other states.

Recently, the Lok Jan Shakti Party (LJP) complained that the BJP did not entertain its request of a respectable tie-up in Jharkhand for the upcoming assembly election. The BJP and the All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) too fell out failing to arrive at a seat-sharing agreement. The AJSU is the oldest ally of the BJP in Jharkhand. They have never fought state elections separately before.

During the Haryana Assembly election, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) lashed out at the BJP on quite a few occasions. The SAD had in June this year proposed an alliance with the BJP in Haryana but the BJP did not pay heed to the call.

In the run-up to the Haryana election, the BJP inducted its lone MLA in the party prompting SAD chief Sukhbir Badal to remind the BJP of maryada (dignity) of the alliance. Later, campaigning for the Haryana election, Sukhbir Badal hit out at the BJP claiming those sitting in power [read the BJP] will be soon in Opposition.

At the NDA meeting in New Delhi last week, LJP president Chirag Paswan stressed the need for a convener of the alliance saying the presence of the Shiv Sena was missed.

This appears as if the alliance partners of the BJP are not comfortable with the parties at present. But a look at the BJP’s relationship with its alliance partners points to a similar tumultuous equation.

THE JAN SANG DAYS

The RSS floated the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) in 1951 making debut politics. The BJS tasted power for the first time in 1967 in Madhya Pradesh when about 60 MLAs of the ruling Congress defected to the Opposition and various parties including the BJS formed the Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal. A government was formed but soon they started quarreling over ideological differences. The government collapsed in 1969.

At the national level, the BJS ceased to exist in 1977 merging itself with other anti-Congress parties to form the Janata Party. It was a grand-alliance of the time. It too collapsed in less than three years. These experiences left such a deep imprint on the RSS-trained leaders of the Jan Sangh that when they founded the BJP (the new version of the BJS) in 1980, they were reluctant to go for alliances.

The Shiv Sena came along over 1984-89 period in Maharashtra, where the BJP was very weak those days. By 1989, the BJP had gained enough strength. The Janata Dal (of VP Singh, Chandrashekhar and Devi Lal) had fallen short of a majority in the election. The BJP had the choice of joining the government giving it stability but it refused. BJP leadership of LK Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, instead, extended outside support to the VP Singh government. They withdrew support over Mandal-Kamandal episode.

NEW ERA OF ALLIANCES

In 1996, the BJP emerged as the single-largest party in the Lok Sabha election. But 161 seats in the Lok Sabha election at that time appeared as the BJP’s cap forcing it to consider a wider alliance to see it gets power at the Centre. Vajpayee was sworn in as the prime minister with a futuristic strategy. Back then, Advani was considered hardline Hindutva leader and Vajpayee moderate.

In 1998 emerged a multi-party alliance called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that the BJP stitched up to come to power. The Janata Dal (United), the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the Janata Dal (Secular), the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, the Shiv Sena, the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Biju Janata Dal, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Haryana Vikas Party were the BJP’s allies among others.

Over the next six years, the AIADMK exited the NDA but the DMK joined in; the National Conference walked away but the Peoples Democratic Party joined. The Trinamool Congress Party of Mamata Banerjee was a part of the NDA. Banerjee was a senior minister in the Vajpayee government. The Lok Janshakti Party of Ram Vilas Paswan was also part of the NDA.

WHO FINDS BJP RELIABLE?

Today, only the JDU, the LJP and Shiromani Akali Dal are part of the BJP-led NDA. All others quit NDA blaming the BJP. The AIADMK of Jayalalithaa snapped ties with the BJP in 1999. The National Conference walked away in 2002, the DMK and the Haryana Vikas Party in 2004, the TMC in 2007, the BJD in 2009, the JDS in 2010, the JMM in 2012 and the list goes on.

The case of JDU is curious. Bihar Chief Minister and JDU president Nitish Kumar pulled out of the NDA in 2013 after it the BJP went ahead with Narendra Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, as its prime ministerial candidate.

The BJP tried to compensate the loss of JDU in Bihar by cobbling up an alliance with caste-based parties such as the Rashtriya Lok Samta Party of Upendra Kushwaha and the Hindustani Awam Party of Jeetan Ram Manjhi. The JDU came back in 2017. The RLSP and the HAM broke alliance with the BJP calling it unreliable.

The LJP too had parted ways with the BJP in 2002 in the wake of Gujarat riots. It joined hands with the BJP again in 2014. This gave Paswan the sobriquet of the political weathercock.

Most of these parties have complained that the BJP piggybacked on them to increase its vote base at their cost. Except for Punjab, where the SAD’s appeal on Sikhism plank continues to be in the lead, the charge against the BJP holds true. In most of the states, where the BJP has expanded its base, it has turned itself into a competitor of its alliance partner.

In Maharashtra, the BJP and the Shiv Sena largely compete for the same vote bank but greater resource availability helped the BJP expand at a faster rate. Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamana today compared the BJP with medieval marauder Muhammad Gori who invaded India multiple times to plunder its wealth ruing that the Bal Thackeray-led party allowed the BJP flourish in Maharashtra. In Odisha, Karnataka, Bihar, Haryana and the Northeast, the BJP has followed almost the same template.

WHAT IS THE LATEST TREND?

At least half-a-dozen parties have broken their alliances with the BJP in the past two years. In 2014, the Swabhimani Paksha of Raju Shetti was said to have played an important role in the consolidation of votes in favour of the BJP in Maharashtra. The BJP was then focusing on aligning with smaller parties with the focused support group. Alliance with the Swabhimani Paksh was one such decision taken by the party.

The TDP of Chandrababu Naidu had an open fight with PM Modi and the BJP leadership and walked away from the NDA in 2018. The same year, the PDP fought with the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir and the alliance fell. The RLSP broke alliance with the BJP in Bihar in 2019.

The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha snapped ties with the BJP in West Bengal, where it was considered as a strong ally of the BJP with popular support in and around Darjeeling. The Shiv Sena and the AJSU have not ended their tie-up with the BJP blaming the party leadership of being un-accommodative to their aspirations and concerns.

In Jharkhand’s Khunti district, ‘pathalgadhi’ movement takes centre stage ahead of upcoming Assembly election.

Source – firstpost.com

Outsiders are met with fear and suspicion in Jikhelata, a village in Jharkhand’s tribal-dominated Khunti district, regardless of whether or not they are in uniform.

Police visits — and the possible use of excessive force — have become frequent since violence erupted in a neighbouring village over the locally-driven Pathalgadhi movement in June 2018. The movement, which seeks to assert the Adivasi community’s right to self-governance as defined in the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, is also likely to have a bearing on the Assembly polls scheduled for 30 November.

The term pathalgadhi literally translates to ‘laying the stone’ which is a traditional custom of the tribal community to mark any significant event like births and deaths. However, since December 2017, its connotation is of a towering slab of stone, painted green, with sections of the Fifth Schedule written in white paint.

It was during an event to mark the pathalgadhi in Jikhelata and the neighbouring Ghagra village that a face-off between the police and locals escalated into violence, resulting in the death of one person and leaving several injured. In retaliation, locals had held four policemen captive, demanding talks with the authorities, and were accused of abduction. There have been repercussions from the incident in Ghagra on various aspects of the locals’ lives, including livelihoods.

“During the search operations for the missing policemen, they entered our homes and even beat up those of us who weren’t at the meeting,” said the locals, all of whom asked to remain anonymous, fearing police action. Having fled from their villages for two months in the middle of the farming season, they were unable to sow their crops in time for the monsoon in July and August. “We were left with no food and had to take up labour for some source of income. We only sow once a year, so we survived the past year by helping each other out, sharing with each other,” they said.

However, residents in villages like Jikhelata, Ghagra, Bhadna and Kevra said that they face a dual threat from the police and Pathalgadhi activists. “Sometimes, we are forced to join Pathalgadhi meetings, which then attract the ire of the police,” a resident of Kevra said.

“We are forced to get involved even when we choose not to, and always get stuck between the two,” he added. This conflict is illustrated by the 26 FIRs that have been filed against countless locals in villages across the district for participating in the Pathalgadhi movement over the past two years. They are charged with sedition, among other offences.

Ranchi-based journalist Anand Dutt said that while the FIRs name four or five people, there are as many as 200 ‘unnamed’ accused in some FIRs. This is a loophole that could enable the police to entangle those who raise questions in the case. Locals in the Kevra village, who also refused to be named, say that a few of the village’s leaders were arrested under similar circumstances earlier this year.

Following an argument with the police stationed at a ‘camp’ in a school on the outskirts of the village in March 2018, one of the leaders was slapped with a FIR that claimed he had “threatened the personnel with lathis, and vandalised and stolen government property”, among other offences. He was also charged with sedition. On the other hand, the leader, who had gone to appeal “peacefully” on behalf of some residents who had complained of “injustices” by the police, said that the delegation led by him wasn’t even armed to begin with.

“We had gone only to speak, why would we carry anything? But they said we had done maar–peet. A few months later I got charged with similar violations in another FIR, and in February this year, they arrested me,” he said. He was released eight months later on 4 October, after a Ranchi High Court judge granted him bail. “Zabardasti fasa diya,” he said, sitting in the verandah of his house.

In Jikhelata, the topic of the upcoming election is met with a cacophony of complaints against the police’s behaviour and the apathy of all the parties. “Why should we vote when we are treated like this?” one of the residents demanded. There is palpable anger against the current BJP government under Chief Minister Raghubar Das. Das, the state’s first non-tribal chief minister and also the first to complete a five-year term, has been criticised for “anti-tribal policies”.

“We are scared because of how much they hit us last year. Most of us who got hit, including women, took at least two months to recover. If the current government wins again, we are anticipating a situation worse than this,” a resident said. However, BJP’s Nilkanth Singh Munda, the incumbent MLA of the Khunti Assembly constituency, said he wouldn’t be able to comment on the issue. Munda, a local is a three-time legislator from the seat.

The government’s attempts to tamper with land rights laws in an attempt to safeguard the Adivasi community’s interests, has also been met with resistance. “No matter which party is in power, if they try to dilute the laws like the Chhota Nagpur Tenancy Act, there will be ulgulan (revolution),” one of the leaders in Kevra village said.

He added that no candidate has raised the issue of land rights in election campaigns so far. “We are also angry with the current government because it keeps talking about development, but there hasn’t been any in our village. We only got working electricity this year, and that could be because of the upcoming election.”

Khunti, a Left Wing Extremism-affected district will vote on 7 December, which is the second phase of the five-phase Assembly election.