Maharashtra | A quota battle reignites

The Maratha demand for reservations in jobs and training returns to roil the state’s politics

BURNING FURY: Maratha Kranti Morcha members block the Pune-Solapur Highway to protest the lathi-charge on their cohort in Jalna district, Sept. 6 (Photo: PTI)

ISSUE DATE: Sep 25, 2023 | UPDATED: Sep 15, 2023 17:30 IST

Seven years after the dominant Maratha group first launched a sequence of silent morchas (protest marches) for his or her calls for like reservations in jobs and training, the difficulty has returned to hang-out politics in Maharashtra. Since 2016, round 58 ‘Maratha Kranti Morchas’—a few of them having lots of of hundreds of individuals becoming a member of them—have been organised in Maharashtra and neighbouring states. The agitation turned violent in 2018, additional beleaguering the then Devendra Fadnavis-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Shiv Sena coalition. There was hypothesis that the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which has a robust base among the many Marathas and was then within the Opposition, had fuelled these protests to nook Fadnavis, a Brahmin. However, the Maratha protests noticed counter-mobilisation by the non-Marathas, particularly by the upwardly cell different backward courses (OBCs), who felt that the Marathas would ultimately eat into their 27 per cent share of reservations. These teams organised ‘Bahujan Kranti Morchas’ throughout the state on related traces.