The renewed agitation for a Maratha quota, which intensified after a hunger strike by pro-quota activist Manoj Jarange-Patil, has forced the Eknath Shinde-led government to expedite the process of granting reservation to the Marathas.
However, Mr. Jarange-Patil’s insistence that the Marathas be given Kunbi Other Backward Class (OBC) caste certificates has provoked strident counter protests from the OBC community, who are fearful of the Marathas eating benefits from their 19% reservation pie.
The Maratha agitation and the OBC counter-agitations come at a time when the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is politically vulnerable in Maharashtra, struggling to maintain harmony between its fractious coalition allies – the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar’s rebel Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) faction – and keep its core OBC voter base intact.
However, the OBC community has been getting increasingly disaffected by the State government’s apparent kowtowing to Mr. Jarange-Patil’s demands, with community leaders warning the State government of sustained agitation if it issued Marathas with OBC certificates.
To pacify them, the BJP swiftly launched the 11-day ‘OBC Jagar Yatra’, whose first phase commenced from the Vidarbha region on October 2 from Wardha’s Sevagram.
The Yatra’s purpose is to highlight the BJP’s contribution for the weal of the OBC community and assuage them that their reservation benefits would not be given to the Marathas.
The significant chunk of the BJP’s OBC vote-bank is concentrated in Vidarbha, which used to be the Congress stronghold prior to the saffron party’s ascendancy in the State in 2014.
The region is a critical factor in Maharashtra’s political equation, with ten of the 48 Lok Sabha seats and 62 of the 288 Assembly seats in the State concentrated here.
However, the BJP presently faces a serious challenge from a re-invigorated Congress in Vidarbha, where the latter party has 15 MLAs of its total strength of 45.
The shift in the BJP’s OBC vote-bank began during Devendra Fadnavis’ tenure as CM (2014-19), when he alienated a number of OBC leaders within the BJP considered his potential rivals, like Pankaja Munde, Prakash Mehta, and Eknath Khadse, who is now with the NCP, while allegedly sidelining others like Chandrashekhar Bawankule.
All of them tacitly blamed Mr. Fadnavis for either engineering their defeats in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election or denying them tickets. While Mr. Khadse eventually joined Sharad Pawar’s NCP, Ms. Munde continues to remain estranged with the BJP top brass, with the latest crackdown by the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Commissionerate on her sugar factory in Beed district further alienating her.
While Mr. Bawankule has since been rehabilitated as BJP State president, the party nonetheless faces a daunting task in wooing back their OBC voters given that big OBC leaders in Vidarbha like Nana Patole (the Maharashtra Congress chief) and Vijay Wadettiwar (the Leader of Opposition) all belong to the Congress.
The adhesion of Ajit Pawar and his NCP faction, dictated by political expediency, has imposed a further strain on the BJP’s calculus by increasing the inflow of Maratha leaders in a party already heaving with a surplus of Maratha faces since Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction joined hands with the saffron party.
It was in the 1980s that the BJP began influencing OBCs in Vidarbha, with ideologue Vasantrao Bhagwat being instrumental in changing the party’s perception from that of a ‘sethji-bhattji’ (trading and clerical castes) party to a more inclusive one.
“It was Mr. Bhagwat who welded the OBC Mali, Dhangar and Vanjari communities, thus giving birth to the BJP’s famous ‘Ma-dha-va’ formula [based on the initial letters of the three communities]. This was carried forward by Gopinath Munde, who despite being a Vanjari leader, emerged as not just a pan-OBC leader in the State but a stalwart leader in his own right,” says senior political analyst Vivek Bhavsar.
Yet, today, the BJP lacks a strong face in the region apart from Mr. Bawankule. As an indicator of the dearth of strong OBC leaders, the prime mover behind the ‘OBC Jagar Yatra’ is Ashish Deshmukh, a Maratha, who re-entered the BJP after a sojourn with the Congress.
Mr. Khadse, now in the Sharad Pawar-led NCP, has hit out at Mr. Fadnavis’ Janus-faced approach on the reservation imbroglio.
“No one has uttered more falsehoods than Fadnavis. Earlier, he said that if OBCs do not get reservation, he would quit politics? Well, the OBC reservation issue is still hanging fire. But, did Mr. Fadnavis quit politics? He has never kept his word. Now, he is deceiving the Marathas by assuring them reservation. He is playing with the feelings of both OBC and Marathas,” said Mr. Khadse recently.
Other OBC community leaders are not only upset with the Shinde government’s ‘subservience’ to Maratha demands, but concerned about heightened social tensions in the State, which they ascribe to the BJP.
“The BJP leadership in the State and Centre prostrate themselves before the Maratha community. Whenever there are major strikes or a community member goes on fast, their leaders rush to appease the Marathas. In Chandrapur, our [OBC] leader Ravindra Tonge, too, was sitting on a hunger strike for 18 days. But, no notice of this was taken by the government, which was only bent on pleasing Manoj Jarange-Patil,” said a leader from the OBC Mahasangh.
