Marathas leave Shinde-Fadnavis-Pawar government floundering with OBC quota demand

The complicated knot of Maratha reservation has got entangled more intricately with the gush of recent protests in Jalna, Maharashtra. And this time around, the police played their part by beating silent and peaceful protests spearheaded by a slim and little-known figure with a long, unkempt hairdo, Manoj Jarange Patil.

Shooting to overnight fame after the lathi-charge on his followers, he went on to stretch his indefinite fast for 17 days until a floundering Shinde-Fadnavis-Pawar government managed to buy peace with him and postpone the impending crisis by another month or so.

But that was not before Jarange had drawn a battery of big Maratha and non-Maratha leaders to the protest site to express their solidarity and support his demand. The first one to meet him and offer support was of course Sharad Pawar. The government woke up late to the impending crisis.

Quota Stir’s Sharp Turn

Jarange’s demand was starkly different from the ones in the past – particularly during the silent rallies held between 2016 and 2017 across the state. Then, the Marathas only demanded that they be granted reservation in line with reservation for the backward classes. Jarange shepherded his followers to go a step further and demand inclusion into the OBC by granting them certificates of Kunbis, a caste that is dominant in eastern Maharashtra and predominantly landed, like them.

Branding themselves as Kunbis is a new twist to the ongoing social assertion by the Marathas, and that’s where the state’s social fractions are about to surface.

Poor Marathas, particularly in Marathwada, a backward and drought-prone region, are gung-ho about this position, but it has put the state government in the bind, it's knee jerk reaction to accepting it on a condition that the families with proof from the Nizam era records could be granted the Kunbi certificates, further complicating what was already an unsolvable imbroglio.

Insisting that this condition be removed, Jarange stayed put with his fast, his following increasing by the day. The state agreed to look into it, but sought time to fix the legal tangles.

Rise Of The OBCs

As this drama unfolded, the OBCs – who had steered clear of the Maratha reservation issue in the past – have begun to mobilise themselves with quiet protests opposing any expansion of their category and inclusion of Marathas as Kunbis in the already overflowing category.

Last week, the former CM and now deputy CM, Devendra Fadnavis, assuaged an OBC protest rally in Nagpur by saying that the government would not include the Marathas in their category, because unlike the CM Eknath Shinde and another deputy CM Ajit Pawar, who are Maratha leaders, the BJP runs a risk of losing out on its large OBC support base if the Marathas were branded as Kunbis.

Who are the Kunbis and who are the Marathas? And can the latter be clubbed with Kunbis, technically, legally and socially? And whether all Marathas would agree to it? Questions abound.

At the root of the simmering issue are three events between 1988 and 1993 – implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations; the 1991 economic reforms, and demolition of the Babri Masjid. The reservation to OBCs in education, jobs and politics shrunk the space that was once solely dominated by the Marathas in administration, social institutions, and politics.

The reforms ripped apart the cooperative structures hitherto dominated by them. Commensurate with it was the opening up of an expanding services sector for other landless and backward class communities; and while the BJP antagonised the Muslims by bringing down the Babri Masjid, the unintended fallout was the consolidation under the Hindutva umbrella of lower rung OBCs also politically antithetical to the Marathas across Maharashtra.

The Maratha Discontent

The Marathas fear they would turn politically irrelevant if they don’t unite – that signal came in 2014. In both the Parliamentary and state assembly elections, the Marathas were subjugated to the role of a junior partner in the power-sharing arrangement with the OBCs consolidating in big numbers behind the BJP and Shiv Sena (then in alliance). This tilted the power equations against the Maratha dispensation, explained by the near wipeout of the Congress and the NCP in Maharashtra then.

While those social processes define the constant protests, there’s another major upheaval within the rural Maratha communities: a raging agrarian crisis and sequential droughts in Marathwada and parts of western Maharashtra, where the community is dominant. It's here that the community is in severe distress epitomised by a high incidence of suicides by farmers, rural-urban migration, and indebtedness, compounded by the upward social mobility of erstwhile non landed OBCs.

Once a dominant class, the Marathas have over one generation suddenly not only stagnated in the economic and social mobility, it finds itself challenged in local politics by lower OBCs, a section of who have found a political voice and created their space in different parties.

The erstwhile landed classes are among the worst hit, successive reports show. The latest being a door-to-door survey conducted by the Aurangabad Divisional Commissionerate earlier this year that portends a bad on-ground scenario. Also triggering the unrest is the prevailing drought-like scenario in six of the eight Marathwada region's districts presently, which the state government failed to anticipate and quickly act upon amidst the political instability within the state.

BJP Running Out Of Options

The Shinde-Fadnavis-Pawar government faces an inferno that it can neither douse nor manage. Jarange has become a hero, and given that all other major Maratha political leaders who have lost credibility following their political machinations, become a unifier of sorts at this juncture.

This also throws a spanner in the BJP strategy to weaken the opposition by driving a wedge in them – first the Sena, now the NCP – and winning a section of Maratha vote. With anti-incumbency setting in and the current government not really performing well, these protests don’t augur well for mainly the BJP.

One difficult way to untie the knot is to make the pot bigger. Which means increasing the statutory cap on reservations above 50 percent. This calls for the intervention of the Parliament. With 2024 elections around, the Modi-government, which came riding on the overwhelming support of the OBCs across the country, won’t dare take that risk and confound its political position by adding fuel to the demand of caste-based census and open a can of worms.

Jarange withdrew his fast last week, but the spectre of state-wide protests and counter-protests over reservations still hangs over the state’s fractious polity.

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.