The decision of the Supreme Court last week to quash the Maharashtra law on reservations for Marathas undoubtedly indicates a crisis for the community, as well as the politics of the state. Beyond that, at a more serious level, it also signifies a deadlock of our political imagination as a democratic collectivity towards meaningful implementation of affirmative action.
A few years ago, during a short period of six months between July and December 2016, the Maratha groups had organised 57 massive silent rallies in every big and small town of Maharashtra over their demand for reservations. Each rally consisted of hundreds of thousands of Maratha youth who vouched for an assertive, and yet silent, ‘non-political’ protest both against the government and elite Marathas. There were loud proclamations of community solidarity, and the visible symbols of the marches contained multiple subtexts of Maratha deprivations, desperations, and aspirations of domination.
Such variety of street politics was seen during the Jat, Gujjar, and Patidar agitations as well. However, what distinguished the Maratha Kranti Morchas (revolutionary marches) was their sustained presence over the years and that too, despite the prevailing consensus among all state-level political parties regarding their demand. With the recent verdict of the Supreme Court, the crisis of the Marathas reaches a dead-end.
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The Maratha conundrum
The crisis of the Marathas is twofold. On one hand, it is about the changing nature of party politics in Maharashtra and a sense of loss of the community’s power since the 1990s. On the other hand, it is also about material deprivations of the community, especially in the post-liberalisation phase. When the twin deprivations clashed with a historically nurtured sense of identity of the Marathas as rulers, their desperations aggravated.
As a predominantly agrarian and numerically dominant caste (cluster), the Marathas share a common predicament with Jats from Haryana or Patidars from Gujarat. One aspect of this predicament is rooted in the structuring of the regional political economies since the1990s and its implications for the material well-being of these still predominantly agrarian communities. In the formative years of Maharashtra’s politics, Marathas controlled agrarian resources and had evolved institutional networks like cooperatives to protect and further their material interests. And yet, these networks shaped in the context of industrial capitalism. Despite their political dominance, the Marathas could never dominate the industrial/capitalist economy of the state, and were forced to adopt a secondary position against the regional capitalists.
Maharashtra’s aggressive capitalist agenda of the post-liberalisation phase added to this imbalance and led to a disjunction between the political and material dominance of Maratha elites during the past three decades.
The Maratha youth could not take much advantage of the state’s rapidly expanding urban, industrial economy in the post-liberalisation period. Also, in the field of higher education, the Marathas could neither compete with the upper castes nor with the Dalits, who benefitted due to the Ambedkarite movement and its political awakening. Instead, the Marathas either remained trapped in agriculture or were accommodated only in the informal economy in hamstrung ‘rurban’ localities.
The National Election Studies (NES) data from recent elections, along with our micro studies of predominantly Maratha villages in Maharashtra, depict the essentially rural/agrarian existence of Marathas and also underline the internal economic stratification within the community. The lack of access to urban economic resources and the increasingly difficult survival in agriculture developed a deep sense of relative deprivation among sections of Marathas, and has pushed them towards strategic appropriations of the reservation discourse during the past two decades.
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Marathas and Maharashtra politics
The other part of the current Maratha conundrum consists of the changing nature of the party politics in Maharashtra since the 1990s. As the Congress party’s position declined in the state, Marathas searched for various political vehicles to express their desperations through, and to register their anger against the established leadership. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) did become a party of the Marathas in the late 1990s. At the same time, they were also attracted to the new subaltern Hindutva discourse of the Shiv Sena, which blended well with their caste pride as erstwhile rulers. The ascendance of the Bharatiya Janata Party as a dominant political force in the state accelerated a further process of fragmentation of Maratha votes across the four main parties. Due to their numerical preponderance, Marathas have always remained an indispensable force in the state’s politics and, therefore, were also able to retain formal power.
At the same time, parties like the BJP also tried to carve out a new social equation in the state consisting of the urban, upper caste, and OBC voters. During its recent stint as the ruling party in Maharashtra, the BJP tried to accommodate elite Marathas in its fold without assigning agency and leadership to them. These attempts to neutralise Maratha dominance and their potential discontent on part of the BJP led to further dispersal of the Maratha vote and disgruntlement among the masses.
The demand for reservations became the only way out of this twin crisis — both for the Marathas and, unfortunately, also for the ruling elites. The consensus on Maratha reservations was, on the one hand, about the indispensability of the Maratha vote in the state’s politics. On the other hand, it was also about the essentially lopsided and ad hoc policy discourse of the state, which led to multiple deprivations and anxieties not only among the Marathas but various social groups.
In order to cover up these failures, successive governments in Maharashtra have left no stone unturned to grant reservations to Marathas by stealth. As the recent court verdict raises serious question marks against these efforts, the Maratha crisis looms large not only for the state of Maharashtra but for the overall discourse of social justice in India.
The author teaches Political Science at Savitribai Phule Pune University. Her recent publication is ‘Last fortress of Congress Dominance: Maharashtra since the 1990s (with Suhas Palshikar) Sage, 2021. Views are personal