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| Beyond Koda |
| Wednesday November 4, 2009 |
| A soft spoken smiling man with gold chains flashing under a bright shirt. That is how I remember Madhu Koda from the summer of 2006. Koda was the Minister of Mines in Jharkhand. I was meeting him for an interview on the state's mining policy. The interview dragged on for half an hour, but did not produce one coherent response. Koda was far too inarticulate. But the greater problem : on concerns like transparency, environment and the social impact of mining, he was clueless. This itself did not alarm. Most ministers in India are clueless or close to it. But what if the minister in question was overseeing almost half of India's mineral resources? 90% of India's coal, 40% copper, 20% iron ore, 90% mica -little squares, circles, asterisks crowd into a school textbook map and make Jharkhand look like one big mine. If politicians and industrialists could get their way, they would make it even bigger. This has meant Jharkhand today is convulsed by a complex maze of competing commercial interests and equally complex and volatile politics of revolving doors. In less than a decade, the state has seen six governments, a record perhaps. Existing along with maximum extraction is maximum poverty. Second only to Orissa, Jharkhand has more than 40 % of people living below the poverty line. What complicates this further is that the state is home to more than a quarter of India's tribals. Indigenous people who are rooted in the land of their ancestors and are living through a deep civilisational siege, of which economic extraction is just one dimension. And yet the players in this plunder are often tribals themselves. Men like Madhu Koda. The son of a poor labourer, Koda's rise in politics was meteoric : an RSS recruit, taken under the wing by BJP's Babulal Marandi, first elected in 1999, but dumped by the BJP in the next elections. He still won as an independent and bargained for the Mines ministry in return for support to the BJP government. An year later, in a bizarre turn, political equations changed and 36 year old Koda became the first Independent MLA in the country to head a government. Like his political career, the whiff of scandal began early. It was said 'powerful interests' had propelled him to the post of Mines Minister. His lifestyle changes were much talked about even in 2006, well before he became chief minister. His crowning as CM itself was dramatic. In the autumn of 2006, Shibu Soren, Lalu Prasad joined hands to prop him up and Congress provided the back support. Today all of them want to have nothing to do with Koda. But can partners in government not be partners in the spoils? And the spoils here are serious business. A single mine can often be worth a few thousand crores : the Chiria mines, possibly Asia's largest iron ore reserves, with more than more 2 billion tonnes of high grade ore, saw a protracted battle between the state government keen to hand it over to private companies, and the central government keen to retain it for its steel company SAIL. Ghatkuri mines have not even been evaluated, but six private companies moved in to acquire rights, despite the mine being reserved for PSUs, as the state government first tried to parcel it out by cleverly fooling the Supreme Court, and then within months, as the government changed, went back on the agreements. The result is a legal mess that has interestingly drawn top lawyer-politicians of the country to defend the steel firms. If the big mines trigger big battles, the smaller ones see serious and intense squabbling. Making it worse is ill defined mining policy, and the most opaque system of tenders and allotments. And finally, just below a deeply flawed legal system exists another layer of illegal pilferage : in Noamundi, the prime iron ore belt, official records show 169 illegal units - some of them traced to big politicians, allegedly even Koda -produce 2000 tonnes of illegal ore, and officials admit a bigger quantity slips through illegally to Paradip port on the Orissa coast every day. At every level of the extraction, the politician has found an entry point. And both non tribals and tribals have been quick to move in, creating a political class that among the most venal and violent. A glimpse of it, in 2008, from North Chhattisgarh : while reporting on state elections, from across the border, I saw a cavalcade of vehicles and arms guards arrive. It belonged to Enos Ekka, a young independent MLA from Jharkhand, keen to expand his influence into the neighbouring state. Dressed in football gear, Ekka strutted around, but when I offered a mike and some questions, he stuttered, and his supporters broke into spontaneous sloganeering to protect their leader from embarrassment. And the cavalcade drove off. It could have been funny, but it was not, when I found out Ekka's back story. Ekka won his first elections in 2005 as a proxy candidate for a Sahu businessman cum leader, in the tradition of young ambitious tribal men fighting elections on behalf of the hugely influential but numerically small business community, and then protecting their interests while in power. What made Ekka even more powerful was that the election threw up a hung house where every independent MLA was worth his weight in gold. Ekka was airlifted from his village, and under tight security, produced by the NDA camp. Once a BJP government was in place, Ekka was rewarded with the Panchayat Raj ministry. Subsequently, the BJP government fell, and a UPA government came into power, first under Madhu Koda, then taken over by Shibu Soren. But the convulsions made little difference to Ekka's life : each time he switched sides and stayed on as minister. Finally, his run ended this year, when in June, Ekka was arrested in a disproportionate asset case and put behind bars. I wonder how much money did Ekka make, and how much more did the others, starting with those who sent him into power, to those who kept him there. That personal ambition, venal politics, corrupt business have combined to create men like Koda and Ekka is a tragedy. But the greater tragedy is what it has meant for Jharkhand, now routinely subtitled 'rich land, poor people', where the richness of life - nature, forests, harmonious people - lies deeply ravaged by intense mining and industrialization, and all the accompanying ruptures. The story of Madhu Koda is not just of a politician swindling crores, but of wider loot and a deeper loss. |
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Supriya Sharma is a roving reporter who, in the last six years, has moved base from Mumbai, to Bihar, and recently Delhi. She is now based in Ahmedabad.
