Maratha reservation issue: As govt calls for all-party meet today, here’s the Opposition stance

“Some people say that making more people (communities) beneficiaries of the OBC quota is an injustice to the poor people in the (existing) OBC quota. This cannot be ignored. The option is to make amendments by the Centre in the Parliament to the existing 50 per cent cap and add 15-16 per cent to it,” Pawar said at a press conference in Jalgaon last week.

Former chief minister and Shiv Sena (UBT) president Uddhav Thackeray, too, has extended support to the demands made by Marathas. Thackeray has asked the Centre to provide reservations to Marathas and OBCs in the special session of Parliament convened later this month. The Sena, which has a support base among lower-class Marathas and the OBCs, has been maintaining that OBC reservation should not be affected.

The Congress, which has the OBC leaders both as the state unit chief (Nana Patole) and Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly (Vijay Wadettiwar) has said the 50 per cent reservation limit should be increased to accommodate Marathas.

Congress state unit chief Nana Patole said the party stands with Marathas in their struggle to demand the reservation. “It is the central government which can solve the issue by increasing the reservation limit above 50 per cent,” Patole had said.

In 2018, the Maharashtra government granted 16 per cent reservation for Marathas in government jobs and educational institutions in the wake of massive protests. It was later slashed to 13 per cent in jobs and 12 per cent in education by the Bombay High Court.

In 2021, the Supreme Court struck down provisions of the Maharashtra law providing reservation to the Maratha community, which took the total quota in the state above the 50 per cent ceiling set by the court in its 1992 Indra Sawhney (Mandal) judgment.

The current crisis began on September 1, when police lathi-charged protesters demanding OBC status for Marathas at the site of local leader Manoj Jarange-Patil’s hunger strike in Jalna.

Jarange-Patil, who has been at the forefront of the recent protests demanding reservation for Marathas, said last week that his hunger strike would continue until the government relaxes the condition of providing genealogical records for a Kunbi caste certificate. He demanded that the document be issued to all Marathas without discrimination.