Maharashtra votes 2024: Why do the powerful Marathas want to be tagged backward?

With its admirable history of reform movements and education initiatives in the colonial British period and cooperatives-led socio-political development in the post-independence decades, Maharashtra enjoyed the status of a progressive state in India, which cast Marathas in a kind light. The last few years of pro-reservation agitations by the Maratha community have taken people within and outside Maharashtra by surprise. Why would a powerful community want to be labelled 'backward' after all?

The domination of Marathas across the state's economy and polity is not a hidden fact – 12 of the state's 19 chief ministers have been from the community, sugar satraps have reigned supreme on near-feudal lines followed by education barons in the last few decades. Yet, why the community coalesced into a powerful voice in recent years with politics-altering marches and fasts, bringing to a head the quieter disparate agitations since the 1990s, leading to three laws repeatedly being enacted in the last 10 years giving it reservation in government jobs and educational institutions offers a multi-dimensional view of Maharashtra itself.

As chief ministers, Prithviraj Chavan in 2014 and Devendra Fadnavis in 2018 ensured that Bills were passed for the reservation; Eknath Shinde did it this February. The earlier attempts set aside 16 per cent. Shinde's government decided on 10 per cent based on the latest report of the Maharashtra State Commission for Backward Classes Commission. His predecessors had relied on similar reports too. The 2014 and 2018 Acts were struck down by the Supreme Court on the grounds that this would exceed the total reservation quota in the state beyond the mandated 50 per cent; Maharashtra has had 52 per cent reservation. The Shinde government's move – to appease the current leader of the community, Manoj Jarange-Patil, in the face of the Lok Sabha polls – takes the total quota to 62 per cent. It has yet to stand judicial scrutiny given the challenges filed.

To state that the Maratha reservation issue is complex and political would be to point out the obvious. However, wrapped in between these folds are many strands less apparent, such as class and location:

• Marathas make about 28-30 per cent of the state's population which is about the same as that of OBC who now seek to protect the reservation granted to them in the wake of the Mandal Commission, setting up a face-off between the communities.

• Three in every four Maratha families live off agriculture – the majority as farm labourers – though the community traces its lineage to the warrior clans besides peasantry. This has confounded many about the claim for 'backward' status.

• Either 37.3 per cent or 21.2 per cent Marathas live below the poverty line, depending on the two reports, in 2018 and 2024 respectively, of the Maharashtra State Commission for Backward Classes. However, both are higher than the state average of 17.4 per cent.

• Nearly 94 per cent of debt-ridden farmers who died by suicide were Marathas pointing to the economic distress among the poorer sections of the community.

• Maratha students have not been eligible for reserved seats in educational institutions while the Maratha youth have not found themselves in the reckoning for government jobs because they cannot claim a quota as Marathas.

• A section of the Marathas is well-off and privileged, including the politically and economically powerful clans or families in rural Maharashtra and the privileged ones in cities. This is the visible and vocal, but non-representative, face of the community.

The deprivation and disadvantaged condition of large sections of the community, documented and seen in various forms and studies, has been conflated with the backward status of the entire community. The demand and the solutions have been political but the angst and pain points lie elsewhere – in economics.

It is no coincidence that the belligerence of the demand came in the post-liberalisation years as the state's economy saw iterations of the agrarian crisis and the shrinking of public sector and government jobs, pushing the majority of Maratha youth towards semi-urban or urban private sector jobs and entrepreneurial work which they were not educated or skilled for.

Their predicament cannot only be solved politically, through reservation, but political expression has been the easier way out. A dominant caste demanding reservation is not specific to Maharashtra; land-owning and politically powerful groups like Patels in Gujarat and Jats in Haryana have been demanding quotas too, as economic changes, global and Indian, put a question mark on their traditional livelihood sources.

The Marathas have traditionally been leaders and supporters of the Congress but there was a drift, even distance by the younger generation, as the socio-economic crisis deepened. Prithviraj Chavan's decision was an olive branch with the 2014 elections looming large. The BJP has fished in the troubled waters, offering itself as a saviour, in 2018. Shinde, himself a Maratha, desires to be the saviour now. In 10 years, on various grounds, the quota written into the Bill has reduced from 16 per cent to 10 per cent.

However, it would be myopic to see the reservation issue in Maharashtra merely in terms of the Marathas. The OBC bloc is on the warpath too, fearing that its share of 19 per cent in the reservation would have to be split with the Marathas if the latter are classified as Maratha-Kunbi or Kunbi-Maratha, as a section of them have been. Largely BJP supporters, their responses to reservation for Marathas and articulation of their fear-anger might upset a few political equations in the state.

In parallel, two other reservation categories have reared their heads: the Dhangars are demanding a change in their categorisation and Muslims, who as a community, have been found to be most disadvantaged economically and socially on various parameters, have to be accommodated too. Five per cent reservation for Muslims was in the 2014 Bill; it neither got the SC nod nor satisfied the community. It is important to note that Maharashtra has had 10 per cent reservation for the Economically Weaker Section under which Marathas have been claiming benefits, which has led not only OBCs and Muslims but also SCs and STs to worry.

In the 2024 election, both Lok Sabha and the state Assembly later in the year, all the factions of all parties are worried about how the issue will play out. Shiv Sena's Uddhav Thackeray has taken on Shiv Sena's Shinde, his erstwhile subordinate, over the issue. BJP's Fadnavis, under fire in 2018-19 on this, has cleverly stepped back, allowing Shinde to be the sole face of the government's decisions. The Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party, certainly the Sharad Pawar faction, are content to watch the discomfiture of the ruling coalition on the issue and, if required, quietly fan the flames of the Maratha agitators.

Whichever way the vote swings, this is hardly the final frame.

Smruti Koppikar is a Mumbai-based independent journalist, essayist and city chronicler. This article is part of an 8-segment series about issues that are crucial to Maharashtra’s development.