Tamar no cakewalk for Soren or Vasundhara

Vijay Deo Jha Ranchi Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The Assembly by-election of Tamar would throw a tough challenge for the contenders where JMM chief and Chief Minister Jharkhand Shibu Soren is likely to be pitted against Vasundhara Munda, widow of slain JD (U) MLA Ramesh Singh Munda.

Vasundhara will file her nomination on December 10. It is likely Soren might file his nomination on December 12, party sources said.

The task facing Soren would be to arrest the sympathy wave in favour of the widow of the slain leader which the JD-U leadership claims would work in their favour. On the other hand the presence of Raja Peter of Jharkhand Party, who lost the last Assembly election in Tamar by a thin margin, is enough to cause consternation in the UPA and the NDA folds.

Peter is again in the electoral fray and the survey indicates he could prove a political migraine for the NDA and the UPA. He is likely to cause more harm to Soren. Well-placed sources in the UPA indicated that efforts were on so that Peter withdraws his nomination in favour of Soren.

Even JMM sources have accepted this fact and counted it as one of the possible reason behind Soren developing cold feet whenever Tamar figured in the poll discourse of the UPA and the JMM.

The Tamar by-election would be a triangular contest and the division of the vote would be sharp.

However the result of the last Assembly elections of Tamar favoured the JD (U) _ the slain MLA Munda had defeated Raja Peter. As a Samata Party candidate Munda had given a crushing defeat to Congress contestant Kalicharan Munda by a margin of 19,029 votes in the 2000 Assembly election.

If the poll statistics of the last two Assembly elections of Tamar are taken together the average poll percentage in the Assembly election 2000 was 53.24 that was a few notches down in the last Assembly election 2005.

Munda was not able to maintain the whooping margin against his contender Raja Peter.

Ready to ride on the sympathy wave JD (U) is trying to encash the popularity of Munda and hope the combined campaigning of the NDA parties would provide a strong ground to Vasundhara.

"I am in politics to fulfill the wishes of my husband and the aspirations of the people of Tamar constituency. I do not believe in rivalry and will ask people to vote for me and my party", Vasundhara said while talking to The Pioneer.

Knowing well that the man on the other hand is none other than the serving Chief Minister of the State, the JD (U) plans to press top party leaders into electioneering. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and JD (U) national president Sharad Yadav and scores of party leaders from Bihar would camp in Tamar, the sources said.