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Maratha quota: ‘Surgical strike’ by Fadnavis

MARATHA reservation has taken centre stage in Maharashtra, three months ahead of the Assembly polls. Marathas are the dominant community in the state. They constitute about 32 per cent of the 12-crore population and have called the shots politically since the state was formed on May 1, 1960, after bifurcating the erstwhile Bombay state into Maharashtra and Gujarat.

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Sunil Gatade
Senior Journalist

MARATHA reservation has taken centre stage in Maharashtra, three months ahead of the Assembly polls. Marathas are the dominant community in the state. They constitute about 32 per cent of the 12-crore population and have called the shots politically since the state was formed on May 1, 1960, after bifurcating the erstwhile Bombay state into Maharashtra and Gujarat.

In a recent order, the Bombay High Court had upheld reservation for the Marathas. On Friday, a Supreme Court Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi did not stay the HC order. While seeking the state government’s response, the SC, however, made it clear that the aspect allowing reservation with retrospective effect from 2014 would not be made operational. This may cause a problem, but the message that has gone to the people is that the BJP-led government, helmed by CM Devendra Fadnavis, has gone the extra mile to give the long-pending quota to the community.

If all goes well, the judgment could create a tectonic shift in the politics of Maharashtra, where the Marathas so far have remained beholden to Sharad Pawar’s NCP to a large extent and to some extent the Congress.  

But that is an old story. Since the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the powerful community has started shifting its loyalties gradually as the BJP has started making inroads into the Pawar territory of the sugar-rich western Maharashtra as also in the backward Marathwada. Once derided as a ‘Brahmin-baniya’ party, the BJP has come a long way in Maharashtra. Its silent social engineering has worked wonders.

The BJP’s ally, Shiv Sena, is feeling increasingly threatened by the scale and size of its victories at the polls at the local level under Fadnavis, a Brahmin, a politically insignificant but educationally powerful community. Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray’s remarks that his party has always backed the Marathas show that he wants to share the credit. When the Maratha stir had turned violent, the Sena, too, had demanded that the CM should quit.

The HC’s decision is not a small matter for the Fadnavis government, which had faced strident agitations from the community for reservation benefits. The silent marches of lakhs of Marathas in the state were a veiled warning that the patience of the powerful community was wearing thin and could turn counterproductive if it failed to get a favourable decision before the Assembly polls.

When Maharashtra enacted a special legislation to confer reservation benefits in education and public employment on the Maratha community last year, a formidable legal challenge was expected. The law created a group called ‘Socially and Educationally Backward Class’ and included Marathas as the sole group under the category, and extended 16 per cent reservation outside the existing quotas for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and other tribes and backward classes. 

The biggest hurdle was the fact that the additional Maratha component would take the reservation up to 68 per cent, thus going beyond the limit of 50 per cent imposed by the SC. Secondly, there were doubts whether one particular caste group could constitute a special class. 

Experts say that the 487-page judgment is a brave effort at answering these difficult questions. Significantly, it has ruled that there were ‘exceptional circumstances and an extraordinary situation’ to warrant the crossing of the 50 per cent limit. It has upheld the government’s decision to accept the Maharashtra Backward Classes Commission’s report on the backwardness of the Maratha community, faulted it for exceeding the panel's recommendation for 12-13 per cent reservation and pulled back the figure to the recommended level. 

The argument was that the failure to treat this group as backward for decades has pushed its members deeper into social and educational backwardness. Though most of the chief ministers of the state have been Marathas, a section of the community has been facing the heat in the changing times of urbanisation and globalisation and for failing to keep pace for want of education. In short, there were ‘haves’, but ‘have-nots’ were growing by the day, especially in the countryside in the times of agrarian distress.

While there could be a debate why the Marathas could be the sole group under the category, but if looked politically, the CM could not have asked for more than the endorsement of his policy.  He moved in the matter methodically in the last few years and the step-by-step and virtually time-bound approach, has reaped dividends.

Now, some analysts of the political scene in the key state are insisting that Fadnavis had done a ‘surgical strike’ on the Opposition through the Maratha reservation issue, which was earlier used by them to target the CM. The talk in the ruling circles is that there is no Opposition worth the name in the once Congress-minded state. The Congress is rudderless and in a pitiable condition with just one seat, while the lone ranger, Sharad Pawar, is fighting with his back to the wall as his party is demoralised, goes the argument.

Maharashtra is undergoing a social and political churning. Since May 2014, its main beneficiary has been the BJP and to a lesser extent the Shiv Sena as it has remained aligned to the BJP. The recent Lok Sabha polls have shown that the BJP-Sena has been able to keep its dominance by retaining 41 of the 48 seats — BJP 23 and Sena 18.  In the last Assembly polls, when the BJP and Sena had contested separately, the BJP had shown that it was the ‘boss’ by securing 122 seats as against 63 by the Sena in the 288-member House.

After the Lok Sabha poll results and now with the Maratha reservation issue, the BJP is in the driver’s seat in Maharashtra and the Sena could benefit if it amicably shares the glory. It would be a miracle if the opposition could put up a spirited fight and secure good seats.

Looking at the larger picture, it would be foolhardy not to believe that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah would not use the Bombay High Court judgment to widen the party’s footprint in other states having issues of reservation of dominant communities. 

Constitutional experts have started cautioning that the judgment will open the floodgates for reservation in favour of dominant castes in other states. If at all there was a legitimate reason to go beyond 50 per cent reservation, as in the case of Tamil Nadu, it could have been inserted in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution, their argument goes.

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