JMM legislature party leader Champai Soren has been sworn in as the Jharkhand chief minister on Friday, two days after former Chief Minister Hemant Soren resigned.
Soren took oath as the head of the government at the ceremony held at Raj Bhavan in Ranchi. Besides Soren, senior Congress leader Alamgir Alam and RJD leader Satyanand Bhokta also took oath as cabinet ministers.
In the 81-member Jharkhand Assembly, the majority alliance has 47 MLAs — JMM 29, Congress 17 and RJD 1. The BJP has 26 members and the AJSU Party three. The NCP and CPI (ML) have one lawmaker each, apart from two Independents.
Before heading to the Raj Bhawan, Champai Soren called on JMM patron Shibu Soren and his wife Roopi Soren to seek his blessings before taking oath as Chief Minister of Jharkhand.
“I came here to seek the blessings of Guruji (Shibu Soren) and Mataji (Roopi Soren) before taking the oath. He is my idol. I had joined the Jharkhand movement and I am his disciple…I work with his principles of uplifting the people of the state. So, I came to seek the blessings of Dishom Guru,” said Soren.
A loyalist of JMM president Shibu Soren, the state transport minister is popularly known as “Jharkhand’s tiger” for his contribution to the long fight for creation of a separate Jharkhand state in the 1990s.
Governor C P Radhakrishnan on Thursday had nominated JMM legislative party leader Champai Soren as chief minister and invited him to take oath. Champai Soren, heading a delegation of JMM-led coalition, called on the governor and urged him to accept his claim to form the government at the earliest as there was “confusion” in the state.
He told Radhakrishnan that the state which was without a chief minister since the resignation of Hemant Soren, deepening the political crisis. Hemant Soren was arrested by the ED in a money laundering case after he resigned as chief minister on Wednesday night.
A matriculate from a government school, Champai Soren (67) got married at a young age and has four sons and three daughters. He started his political career by getting elected as an independent MLA through a by-election from the Saraikela seat in 1991. Four years later, he contested the assembly polls from the seat on JMM ticket and defeated the BJP’s Panchu Tudu.
In the 2000 assembly elections, he was defeated from the same constituency by the BJP’s Anant Ram Tudu. He regained the seat in 2005 as defeating the BJP candidate by a margin of only 880 votes. Champai Soren won the subsequent elections in 2009, 2014 and 2019.
