The formal split in the National Congress Party that the country witnessed on Tuesday has been long in the making. It’s a story of confused caste identities, canny quota calculations, evolving party politics and growing personal ambitions.
It could be said that the lurch towards the current impasse started in the 1990s. In that era, the reservation issue split poor Marathas and rich Marathas, Marathas and Kunbis, Marathas and OBCs, and Marathas and upper castes. As a power struggle broke out over cabinet positions too, the political and social factors got interlinked, resulting in further complications.
It suited the BJP well when the Maratha community was split on one count or another. Earlier, when Shashikant Pawar, Annasaheb Patil and Vinayak Mete had started the call for reservation, the BJP (then the Jana Sangh) had maintained friendly relations with them. There were four sub-groups that spoke for the Marathas. But when the prospects of them coalescing as one group arose, the upper-caste base of the BJP base saw it as a threat to dominance.
On the other hand, despite supporting reservations for their community in general, the Maratha leaders themselves have not always seen eye to eye on the kind of reservation they are happy with—those like Sharad and Ajit Pawar have refrained from being very vocal in their support for the OBC tag. Whereas Manoj Jarange Patil continues to support the claim that the Marathas are Kunbis, and hence a backward caste.
It did not help that Sharad Pawar, who sees himself as a mass leader commanding a wider base in the state and a national player of importance, insisted on Chaggan Bhujbal being a deputy when Ajit Pawar was in the chief minister’s chair. And a crack formed, which became a chasm with the pulls and pressures of other power players.
At the back of it is the story of the Maratha community’s own identity. The quota controversy has simmered—and at times boiled over—over which quota group they want to belong to. Apart from the Maratha community itself, the issue has embroiled parties, governments, caste organizations, other OBC communities, the Backward Classes Commission, courts, and the media. They have all given new shapes to the old question in the light of the day’s politics.
Two important questions remain. One, socially, who are the Marathas? Two, under which quota should the Marathas be included? These two questions have continued to shape the politics of Maharashtra.
Does the Maratha community’s claim under the OBC quota have any historical basis? If the Marathas are identified Kunbis, it would mean that they are an OBC group. But between 1950 and 1989, the Maratha community did not claim itself to be an OBC group.
The community’s claim to an OBC has been rejected several times too. The Kakasaheb Kalelkar Committee earlier and the Mandal Commission later did not include the Maratha community in the OBC category. At that time, the Maratha community, including the Maratha caste organisations, did not aggressively push for inclusion under the OBC quotas. So in this sense, this is an ahistorical claim. And Patil has ignored this early history when demanding inclusion under the OBC quota. From the 1990s to the present, different governments have made efforts to arrange new quotas for the Marathas.
In 2004, the Sushil Kumar Shinde government decided to include the Marathas in the OBCs quota. But a court rejected the state government’s decision. A major conflict ensued between the courts and the state government. Later, the Bapat, Rane, Khatri, and Maruti Gaikwad commissions proposed new categories of quotas be set up. Among the recommendations were a Special Backward Class (SBC) and a Social-Educational Backward Class (SEBC).
Instead, the government of India created the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) quota. While the courts retained the Union government’s EWS quota, the SBC and SEBC quotas made by the Maharashtra government were annulled and the reservations under these quotas invalidated. The issue of political participation had not been included in the new quotas—only employment and education; the court invalidated the two implements too.
Major fault lines
The main conflict now is between the Marathas and OBCs. OBC communities are opposed to the inclusion of the Marathas. They profer three reasons to keep the Marathas out. One, the inclusion of Marathas in the 27 percent for the OBCs would reduce employment and education opportunities for those already in the fold. Two, if reservation is given to the Marathas for employment and education, they could later claim political quotas too. Three, Marathas are a politically dominant caste. If they are included in the OBC quota, the caste’s dominance would increase.
This is another reason the SCs and OBCs are opposed to their inclusion under the OBC quota. The concept of pitting Marathas as OBCs is also opposed by the upper castes and the ‘warrior group’ within the Maratha community. They say that the Marathas are not a single caste, but a ‘caste cluster’. The warrior group within the Maratha community considers itself to be high aristocracy and are against accepting a ‘backward’ identity. The upper castes, including those in the BJP, have consistently opposed the political dominance of the Marathas and don’t want it to increase.
So the categorisation of Marathas as OBCs is strongly opposed by the Scheduled Castes, other OBCs and the upper castes. These three have closed ranks on this issue. As a result, the quota discourse remains boiling on fires lit long back.
Prakash Pawar
Professor, Shivaji university kohlapur, and coordinator, Centre for gandhian studies