Shinde buys time for Maratha quota, but the distress fuelling protests is a ticking time bomb

The BJP has deployed its second rung and regional leaders to assist CM Eknath Shinde in dealing with the problem.

Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde, currently besotted with some of the toughest political challenges, has got some respite on the contentious issue of Maratha reservation.

The first challenge is like a hanging sword: The CM and his MLAs who broke away from the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena and wrested control over its poll symbol faces a possible disqualification from the legislature, with the Supreme Court asking the Speaker of the assembly Rahul Narvekar to decide on the pending petitions by the end of this year.

The second is even more daunting: how to navigate the legal-statutory processes to ensure the Maratha community gets a durable reservation, with the BJP distancing itself from the inferno to assuage and protect its OBC vote bank, given the Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis stating that Shinde is besieged of the issue and dealing with it on a priority basis. Of course, the BJP has deployed its second rung and regional leaders to assist Shinde in dealing with this problem.

Clock Ticking On Shinde’s Two Challenges

The first challenge has a way out: Fadnavis has already hinted that Shinde could be elected to the legislative council and remain the CM should he be disqualified. More challenging is the second issue, where the Maratha youths won’t settle for anything less than reservation. A respite for Shinde came from the protagonist of the protests himself.

The newest Maratha community poster boy, Manoj Jarange Patil, quietly withdrew his indefinite fast and gave the state government two more months to sort out the legal-constitutional issues in clearing the way for the community to finally get unconditional and total reservation.

It seems that the CM, after sleeping over the issue for a month since Jarange withdrew his first indefinite fast in September, has been working behind the scenes to cultivate Jarange to give up his hard stand for now and give his government more time to find a way out of this conundrum. Shinde and his government are on the clock, with Jarange giving an ultimatum this time around.

Deft as it was, Jarange’s move immediately calmed the flaring tempers and nipped the sporadic violence that threatened to discredit his movement, the epicentre of which is currently situated in the rural Marathwada. This was undercut by Shinde reaching out to all political parties last week, except inviting Uddhav Thackeray, baring his pettiness in dealing with such a crucial issue.

Two of Shinde’s deputies, Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar, have been out of picture for a fortnight now, the former preferred to campaign for his party in the ensuing Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh assembly elections away from the Maharashtra potboiler, the latter is down with dengue.

The Maratha Reservation Demand

What surprised everyone was Jarange’s astuteness to withdraw his indefinite fast, signalling his willingness to retreat from a hardened position when he saw the agitation, which he alleged had been sparked by the elements in the Shinde-government, getting violent and tarnished.

With that the focus is back on what Shinde government does. As of now, it seems to be working on two parallel tracks: one is to find out how many Maratha households have in the past got the ‘Kunbi’ caste certificates, the other is to prepare robustly to plead before the Supreme Court to rethink its verdict on the previous case allowing for the state’s latest position to be heard.

A committee under a retired high court judge is scanning millions of pages to find if the Maratha households carrying Kunbi certificates be granted reservation immediately, a position Jarange isn’t comfortable with. So far, this committee has found about 12,000 households with such certificates, and if you multiply that with the logic that their close and immediate relatives too would be Kunbis, that number is likely multi-fold.

Jarange and his tribe want a blanket reservation for all the Marathas, irrespective of whether or not they have the Kunbi certificates. “Whoever demands it, should get the caste certificate,” Jarange has held. “No other solution.”

A major genealogical argument has been that the Maratha and Kunbi have the same origin. Some studies say that while the former households remained in their traditional vocation of farming, the latter chose to join the army of the Maratha empire under Shivaji. For a few centuries this division stayed in vogue until the Maratha community felt politically and socially challenged in the post-liberalisation period.

Maratha Perception Of Decline, Kunbi Anxieties

At the root of this movement, starting from the silent Maratha Kranti Morchas in 2016, until now, is the economic and social downslide that the Maratha peasantry has suffered in the past two decades as the agrarian crisis worsened and the OBCs emerged as a potent political challenge to them.

The Kunbis, the landed peasantry mostly in Vidarbha, form the part of the OBC rubric, unlike the Marathas, who once took pride in them being in the open category. Not anymore. With the once-dominant Maratha community now asking for reservation, the OBCs, not so much as the Dalits (Scheduled Castes) and the Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes), have turned a bit anxious, fearing that if the Maratha community gets included with them, the OBC category will get crowded.

This intense social anxiety is driving the current political slugfest, given that a splintered polity in Maharashtra finds itself cornered by this vexed issue. No one wants to be seen as anti-Maratha, and no one wants to be so pro-Maratha that it antagonises the other communities, mainly the OBCs. Add to it the grave economic realities, and the socio-political conundrum aggravates further.

Shinde meanwhile seems to have begun the work on a war footing. He has ordered setting up of special cells at all divisional and district collectorates to scan records of the Marathas and verify who’ll have got the Kunbi certificates, indicating that the immediate relief would be to include them within the OBC rubric to buy more time to work out a reservation formula for those who don’t have such certificates. Next year is an election year. Shinde has to douse the fire quickly.

Quotas: A Cake That’s Shrinking

The die however has been cast, and there’s no option but to work out a reservation formula for the Marathas but to the happiness of all social formations who covet an equal slice of the cake.

The cake meanwhile has shrunk: Jobs, in private and government domains, are few and far between. The Shinde-government last month issued a resolution that sought to outsource every post through sundry contractors, a move that had to be subsequently withdrawn in the face of protests from all quarters.

Agriculture is in crisis. No new industry has been set up. Health and education costs are piercing the roof. The new aspiration class, particularly among the youths, is craving for opportunities that don’t exist. The future looks more uncertain than ever before.

Jaideep Hardikar is a Nagpur-based journalist, a core team member of the People's Archive of Rural India, and the author of "Ramrao - The story of India's farm crisis". Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.