Big Fish Eat Little Fish’: Hemant Soren Calls for Indigenous Solidarity Across India
Jharkhand CM warns divided Adivasis face erasure without immediate pan-India unity.
Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren delivered a grim prognosis to tribal communities nationwide, warning that persistent division will lead to their gradual extinction in a system dominated by larger political and corporate interests. Using the stark metaphor “big fish always eat little fish,” he told representatives gathered from across states that isolated struggles and internal fragmentation only accelerate systemic marginalisation and demographic erasure.
Speaking at a major tribal confluence, Soren highlighted the chronic under-representation of Adivasis in successive national censuses, inadequate political recognition, and the near-total absence of tribal chief ministers outside the Northeast and select states. He charged that neighbouring governments appointed tribal leaders to the top post only after Jharkhand set the precedent, exposing a deeper reluctance to grant indigenous communities real power at the highest levels of governance.
Invoking the revolutionary legacy of Birsa Munda, Sidhu-Kanhu, Tilka Manjhi, and his own father “Dishom Guru” Shibu Soren, the Chief Minister declared Jharkhand not merely a state but the spiritual heartland of India’s indigenous population—“the land of Mother Earth” that must now lead a national awakening. He questioned whether Jharkhand’s vast mineral wealth has been a blessing or a curse, pointing to continuous land alienation and environmental plunder that disproportionately affect tribal existence.
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Soren linked escalating ecological crises—from the ongoing destruction of Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo forests to Delhi’s toxic air—to the systematic sidelining of indigenous knowledge systems that have preserved nature for millennia. He asserted that tribal society’s oral traditions and reverence for water, forests, and land constitute humanity’s most authentic ecological document, yet remain ignored in national policy while the world now faces the consequences of that neglect.
Determined to convert rhetoric into action, the JMM president directed his office to compile a comprehensive database of tribal leaders present, pledged personal outreach across states, and announced a forthcoming detailed action plan for coordinated political mobilisation. Emphasising that only a united tribal bloc can force indigenous issues onto the national agenda, Soren concluded that solidarity is no longer a choice but the sole shield against demographic, cultural, and existential annihilation.
