He was the Minister for Coal in the Union Cabinet in November 2006, when a Delhi district court found him guilty in the murder of his private secretary Shashi Nath Jha in 1994. He has also been indicted in the past on other criminal charges.

Soren was born in Nemra village of Hazaribagh district Jharkhand States and territories of India. He completed his schooling from the same district. After schooling, he got married and decided to work with his father who was a farmer. He has three sons—Durga, Hemant, and Basant—and a daughter, Anjali.

He started his political career in the early 1970s and rose to become a tribal leader. On 23 January 1975 he was alledly part of a mob that attacked the Muslim-dominated Chirudih village in Jamtara district in a campaign to drive away "outsiders", a term used to describe non-tribals. Ten people including nine Muslims and six policemen were killed who were helping the moneylenders to exploit the poor and illiterate santals. Along with sixty eight others, he was charged with murder.

He lost his first Lok Sabha election in 1977. He was first elected to the Lok Sabha in 1980. In 1986, an arrest warrant was issued against him. He was subsequently elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989, 1991 and 1996 as well. In 2002, he was elected to the Rajya Sabha with the help of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He won the Dumka Lok Sabha seat in a by-election the same year and resigned his Rajya Sabha seat. He was re-elected in 2004.

He became the Union Coal Minister in the Manmohan Singh government, but was asked to resign following an arrest warrant in his name in the thirty-year old Chirudih case. After the warrant was issued, he initially went underground. He resigned on 24 July 2004. He was able to secure bail after spending over a month in judicial custody; released on bail in September 8, he was re-inducted into the Union Cabinet and given back the coal ministry on 27 November 2004, as part of a deal for a Congress-JMM alliance before assembly elections in Jharkhand in February/March 2005.

On 2 March 2005, he was invited to form the government in Jharkhand by the Governor of Jharkhand, Syed Sibtey Razi. He resigned as Chief Minister nine days later, on 11 March, following his failure to obtain a vote of confidence in the assembly.

Life imprisonment and acquittal

On2006, Soren was found guilty of murder in the twelve year old case of the kidnapping and murder of his former personal secretary Shashinath Jha. Apparently Jha was abducted from the Dhaula Kuan area in Delhi on May 22, 1994 and taken to Piska Nagari village near Ranchi where he was killed. The CBI chargesheet stated that Jha's knowledge of the reported deal between the Congress and the JMM to save the then Narasimha Rao government during the July 1993 no-confidence motion and an act of sodomy was the motive behind the murder. The charge-sheet asserted that: "Jha was aware of the illegal transactions and also expected and demanded a substantial share out of this amount from Soren."

Soren has resigned from his post of Union Minister for Coal after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh demanded that he do so in the wake of the verdict. This is the first case of a Union Minister of the Government of India being found guilty of involvement in a murder. On 5 December 2006, Shibu Soren was sentenced to life imprisonment; he still awaits trial in the Chirudih case.

Recently a Delhi court rejected his bail plea, stating: 'We cannot overlook the fact that the appellant (Soren) has been convicted after a detailed and elaborate trial only in November 2006 and sentenced in December 2006.' The bench also noted that he was also being tried in a number of other cases, including the case of mass murder in Jharkhand.

Subsequently however, the court pulled up the prosecuting attorney, R M Tiwari of the (Central Bureau of Investigation), for "not doing its homework" and presenting weak evidence.

On June 25, 2007, Shibu Soren was being escorted to his jail in Dumka, Jharkhand when his convoy was attacked by bombs, but no one was hurt.

The Delhi High Court on 23 Aug 2007 overruled the District Court and acquitted Soren, . stating that "the prosecution has miserably failed in bringing home the charge against the accused persons. The trial court's analysis is far from convincing and not sustainable."

The five men convicted by the Tis Hazari court were held guilty of criminal conspiracy, abduction and murder primarily on the basis of forensic evidence provided by a post-mortem report of a body discovered in Jharkhand, namely a skull superimposition test and skull injury report. This was in addition to eyewitness accounts and some circumstantial evidence. But the DNA that had been extracted from the skeleton did not match Jha's immediate family: in its judgment overruling the district court, the High Court bench wondered how the trial judge could have "ignored the well-established fact that a DNA test is considered conclusive evidence while skull superimposition tests only allude to a probability"citation needed], concluding that the skeleton was not Jha and that the case reduced to merely circumstantial evidence.