Is agrarian distress behind the Maratha quota stir?

For the better part of two years, the Maratha community has been quietly taking to the streets in large numbers, raising the demand for reservation in education and government jobs. Silent marches in the cities and towns of Maharashtra drove home the point that the community was too large to be ignored, both in terms of its standing in society as well as an electoral force.

On August 9, 2017, the 58th silent rally undertaken by the Marathas culminated in Mumbai, the financial capital of the country. Legislators occupying the corridors of power, an echo chamber for political correctness and electoral considerations, moved to assuage the concerns of the community, but all was forgotten as the marchers retreated from the streets of Mumbai. Silence did not work.

After a period of dormancy, the movement awoke with renewed vigour in August 2018, reneging its earlier vow of silence. The protests turned violent. Buses were torched, public property was damaged and life came to a standstill in many parts of Maharashtra. As many as 18 Maratha youths have taken their own lives in the past few months to further the cause of reservation for the community.

The call for greater representation in education and government jobs could be as much a product of the stress on the agrarian economy, as the role of age-old caste equations. Here’s a look at some of the factors that are key to understanding the Maratha agitation:

Legal hurdle

The Maratha community accounts for about a third of the state’s population and are mainly engaged in agriculture. The youth are demanding up to 72,000 government jobs. In the pre-Mandal days, it was the governor, in his position as titular head of the state, who had the jurisdiction to amend the list of backward classes. However, any such change would be vetted by the cabinet, giving the government de facto control over classification of communities, with regards to their eligibility for reservation.

Expert panels at the level of states and the Centre were empowered to make such decisions in the aftermath of the Indra Sawhney judgment in 1992. However, legislative status was granted to such bodies by Maharashtra only in 2005. Latency in forming monitoring panels and unreliable historical data have held back progress in undertaking a comprehensive demographic audit in the state.

Under Narayan Rane, a Maratha leader and former chief minister, the government set up a committee to study the issue of reservation for the Maratha community. The Bombay High Court rejected the committee’s recommendations over concerns that its report was prepared hastily and not an actual reflection of ground reality. It completed research spanning 1.8 million people in less than two weeks, casting doubts on the veracity of the report and the political compulsions of the government.

Political force

The Maratha community used to once enjoy political supremacy in Maharashtra, but its influence has waned over the years. In 1978, Maratha strongman Sharad Pawar took over the reins of power in the state at the age of 38. His party still holds substantial clout within the community, but political equations have changed in the interim.

Two decades after Pawar’s emergence in Maharasthra politics, the state’s first Brahmin chief minister was forced to cede power ahead of Assembly elections in favour of Narayan Rane, a Maratha leader from the state’s Konkan belt. Devendra Fadnavis, only the second Brahmin chief minister in the state’s history, is now faced with the choice of taking the politically expedient decision of ceding to the demands of protestors, or risking his prospects of re-election in 2019.

The Maratha community yields significant influence electorally, and the outcome of the upcoming Assembly and Lok Sabha elections in the state could well hinge on how the call for reservation is handled.

The share of Maratha leaders in the cabinet of ministers has fallen to 44 percent from a high of 62 percent between 1999 and 2004, according to a study by researchers from Savitribai Phule Pune University. Data indicates that the cabinet of ministers under non-Congress governments in the state were more representative of the prevailing social fabric, with a greater share of upper castes and upwardly mobile communities in government.

The Congress-NCP coalition, which ruled Maharashtra for three consecutive terms between 1999 and 2014, had a higher share of Maratha legislators in ministerial posts. Over 60 percent of the cabinet was occupied by Maratha leaders, while the community’s population amounts to roughly 30 percent of the total.

Source: Economic and Political Weekly

However, data from a 2014 study undertaken by the Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDC) throws up contradictory results. It says a majority of Maratha votes went to the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in the 2014 polls. The recent agitation could spell an opportunity for the Congress and the NCP to claw back on ground ceded in the previous elections.

According to data compiled by Suhas Palshikar in a research paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly, the BJP received the majority of the Maratha votes in North Maharashtra and Vidarbha, while alliance partner Shiv Sena was the beneficiary of anti-incumbency sentiment among the Maratha community in West Maharashtra and the Mumbai-Thane region.

Farm sector woes

Source: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics

The government commissioned a team from Pune’s Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics to assess the backwardness of the Maratha community. Its report concluded that 26 percent of all farmer suicides were by members of the Maratha community — the highest among all caste groups in the state. It was noted that a lack of proper irrigation is the prime driver nudging Maratha farmers to take their own lives.

Almost 90 percent of farmers in Vidarbha and 84 percent in the Marathwada region who took their own lives were tilling unirrigated land. However, it was also found that in comparison to other groups which come under the umbrella of reserved castes, Marathas are relatively better educated and have greater access to financial services such as loans from scheduled commercial banks.

Low returns from agriculture have added to the woes of farmers in large parts of Maharashtra. Between FY2007 and FY2015, net returns from farm produce have declined. Net returns are calculated by deducting the cost of production from wholesale prices.

[Click on subhead to view crop-wise data]

Net returns from cotton cultivation has gone down from 10.1 percent in 2008-09 to -11.8 percent (loss) in 2014-15, according to data compiled by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare. The trend is similar for other crops cultivated in the state such as paddy, soybean and wheat. Net returns from soybean have gone down from -0.1 percent in 2008-09 to -30.1 percent in 2014-15.

This is because wholesale prices have not kept pace with the increase in production costs. The cost of production is taken as the ‘C2’ metric defined by the Swaminathan Committee’s report on the minimum support price of crops. The Comprehensive Cost (C2) takes into account rent and interest foregone on owned land and machinery, over and above the out-of-pocket expenses borne by farmers, such as term loans for machinery, fertilisers, fuel, irrigation, cost of hired labour and leasing land.

Source: Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, Agmarknet.gov.in

For the six leading crops in the state by area under cultivation, input costs have leapfrogged the selling price of all but one. The price of paddy has remained at the same level as input costs, meaning that farmers cultivating the crop will just about manage to break even. The cost of producing jowar has risen by 37.2 percent between 2006-07 and 2014-15 while prices have increased by only 15.8 percent.

Moreover, Maratha farmers have small and marginal land holdings, according to a paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly. This means that they are more vulnerable to adverse natural outcomes such as a bad monsoon, or pestilence that can result in the ruin a season’s yield. It was found that 30 percent of the Maratha population owns 1-2 hectares, while 23 percent have less than 1 hectare, and 13.4 percent are landless.

A drop in profitability, compounded by small land holdings, is pushing more Maratha farmers into debt. The failure of the agrarian economy has left a large section of the population looking at alternative careers outside of farms. In addition to the caste calculus, the Marathas’ call for reservation stems from a deep-rooted neglect of the farm sector that has led to great distress in the state’s hinterland.

The Maharashtra State Backward Classes Commission, which has been tasked with studying the socio-economic status of the Maratha community, will deliver its verdict on November 15. The commission’s recommendations regarding the question of reservation could cast a shadow on the state’s polity as Maharashtra heads to the polls in 2019.