Maratha ire with the Maharashtra government is a time bomb waiting to explode.
The Maratha Kranti Morcha, a seemingly leaderless organisation but nonetheless superbly organised, has held 58 silent marches across Maharashtra over the past year. At the last rally in Mumbai on August 9, they submitted a memorandum to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis warning him to meet all their demands by August 30 or face dire consequences.
The Marathas – a caste with significant clout in politics, agriculture and the cooperative sector in Maharashtra – started mobilising across the state after a girl from the community was gang-raped and murdered allegedly by Dalit men in Kopardi village in Ahmednagar in July last year. The campaign for justice for the girl soon expanded to include several other demands.
Fadnavis in a fix
After the massive Mumbai rally, Chief Minister Fadnavis quickly issued a couple of government resolutions promising hostel accommodation for Maratha students in rural areas and scholarships for higher education. But these decisions were the easier parts of the task before him.
What Fadnavis cannot take a call on is the Maratha demand for amendments to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, which penalises people who abuse Dalits and Adivasis, or that government jobs be reserved for the Maratha community. These two areas would require Constitutional changes and the intervention of the Union government.
But as the deadline approaches, Maratha Kranti Morcha convenor Karan Gaykar told Scroll.in that the community believes that the chief minister is not taking them seriously. “He feels we are no threat because our morchas were silent and clean,” said Gaykar. “We will not settle for half measures like he did with farmers when they went on strike for a loan waiver. It will have to be all or nothing. And if our demands are not met within the specified time frame, we will show him what we are capable of, and that will be worse than anything this country has seen before.”
To begin with, Marathas will obstruct the chief minister’s movements when he travels in Maharashtra, Gaykar said. They will also prevent cabinet ministers from entering their homes. “The government will come to a standstill and nothing will move,” said Gaykar. “The Centre will be compelled to push Fadnavis off his chair.”
Gaykar added: “Even the cops will be able to do nothing if people hiding in the bushes pelt stones at his convoy and run away.” He warned that the Patidar violence in Gujarat and Jat violence in Haryana will be overtaken by Maratha violence and will be remembered for long afterwards.
Given the numbers of people who attended the Maratha rallies over the year, this is no idle threat. Some protests saw many as 5 lakh to 12 lakh people in attendance. The participants cut across age, class and political alignment. There were children and teenagers, landlords and the landless, farmers and professionals, the rich, middle classes and the poor. Supporters of the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party as well as those of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena turned up for the rallies in big numbers.
Some challenges
Despite their privilege, it is clear that Marathas are facing significant livelihood issues. Most of them are farmers, but their earnings have dropped over the years as their land holdings have shrunk. They are also feeling edged out by Dalits who, with the benefit of reservations in government jobs and educational institutions, have become more prosperous and have risen up the bureaucracy. Marathas often have to defer to Dalits, which some of them find difficult to accept.
Marathas are also chafing at the return of Brahmin domination in the state. For the first time since Independence, there are very few Marathas in the state cabinet, which is headed by a Brahmin.
But when it comes to the demand for reservations, rhe government has limited to room to manoeuvre, said Sudhir Gavhane, Dean of the Liberal Arts Faculty, at the Maharashtra Institute of Technology World Peace University in Pune. For this to proceed, the Maharashtra State Backward Classes Commission would have to make a recommendation.
Classifying backward classes
However, even the Maharashtra State Backward Classes Commission cannot recommend reservations to any one particular community or caste. Reservations are extended to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes as a group of deprived “classes” – with “classes” being the operative word.
That is because people of one caste may be poor in one state and economically self-sufficient in another. However, the Marathas are neither social and educational backward, pointed out Gavhane. Even if they were, they could not have sought reservations for themselves on the basis of caste alone. If at all, Marathas will have to be adjusted among the Other Backward Classes grouping. But this has the potential to create social unrest, he noted. Already, leaders of the Other Backward Classes have said that they would protest any attempt to grant Marathas reservations as this would dilute their own quotas.
Chief Minister Fadnavis has his task cut out for him, particularly as August 30 is not too far away and comes bang in the middle of the Ganpati festivities, on which the police are focussing their attention.
What could the Maharashtra government possibly do? The only solution, said Gavhane, is to speed up the recommendations to the Backward Classes Commission and hope for the best.
