The Maratha demand for reservations in jobs and schooling returns to roil the state’s politics
BURNING FURY: Maratha Kranti Morcha members block the Pune-Solapur Freeway to protest the lathi-cost on their cohort in Jalna district, Sept. 6 (Photograph: PTI)
Seven years after the dominant Maratha group first launched a collection of silent morchas (protest marches) for his or her calls for like reservations in jobs and schooling, the difficulty has returned to hang-out politics in Maharashtra. Since 2016, round fifty eight ‘Maratha Kranti Morchas’—a few of them having tons of of hundreds of people joining them—have been organised in Maharashtra and neighbouring states. The agitation turned violent in 2018, further beleaguering the then Devendra Fadnavis-led Bharatiya Janata Get together (BJP)-Shiv Sena coalition. There was speculation that the Nationalist Congress Celebration (NCP), which has a robust base among the Marathas and was then in the Opposition, had fuelled these protests to nook Fadnavis, a Brahmin. Nevertheless, the Maratha protests noticed counter-mobilisation by the non-Marathas, particularly by the upwardly cellular other 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 comparable strains.