On 27 January 2024, crowds gathered at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Chowk Vashi after Manoj Jarange Patil ended protests for Maratha reservation after the Eknath Shinde Government accepted all his demands.
When the Maharashtra Police lathi-charged protesters demanding reservations for the Maratha community in Antarwali Sarathi last September, it spurred a chain of events in Maharashtra’s political landscape. Manoj Jarange Patil, a farmer from the drought-stricken Marathwada region, emerged as the face of the movement. His hunger strike, initially a local affair, captured statewide attention, with politicians across party lines scrambling to demonstrate that they were sympathetic to the cause. But the agitation and its aftermath also underscored the fragility of Maharashtra’s sociopolitical fabric, where caste, economic distress and identity politics intersect. For some, Jarange Patil represents hope for justice. For others, he is a destabilising force threatening the hard-won rights of Dalits and Other Backward Classes.
Local journalists told me that, in the aftermath of the lathi charge, one of the first leaders to reach the spot was the former chief minister Sharad Pawar, who chairs the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi. “After he paid a visit, several other leaders started going to meet Jarange,” Rajebhau Mogal, a senior journalist based in the Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar district—formerly known as Aurangabad—told me. “In my personal view, if he had not gone, maybe Jarange would not have become the phenomenon he has become.” As Maharashtra heads into an assembly election, the “Jarange factor” looms large.
The Maratha community, which constitutes nearly thirty percent of Maharashtra’s population, has historically wielded political power, producing 12 of the state’s 18 chief ministers. There are socioeconomic disparities within the community. While the elite Gadivarcha Marathas—the name denotes car ownership—enjoy political influence, many Marathas, especially in Marathwada, struggle with poverty, debt and frequent droughts. Marathwada is often in the news for the high rates of farmer suicides.
The Maratha agitation, as the researcher Sanjay Patil pointed out to me, cannot be understood in isolation from the larger agrarian crisis engulfing Maharashtra. Over sixty percent of the state was declared drought-affected in February this year, with Marathwada and Vidarbha bearing the brunt. Beed, the epicentre of violent clashes during the 2023 protests and among the most marginalised districts in Marathwada, accounted for 186 farmer suicides in the first six months of 2023—the highest in the region. According to local leaders, nearly six hundred thousand people, from all castes, migrate from the district every year to cut sugarcane in Paschim Maharashtra.
The impact of the Maratha vote in Marathwada was evident during this year’s general election, with representatives from the community winning all seven unreserved seats in the region. In Beed, the big shock was the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Pankaja Munde losing to Bajrang Sonwane of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar). Pankaja hails from the Vanjari community, a strong OBC community in Maharashtra, and is the daughter of the late Gopinath Munde, who was one of the BJP’s most prominent OBC leaders. What makes the loss even more curious was that Pankaja and her cousin—and former rival—Dhananjay Munde of the NCP had stood united during the election.
Mogal argued that the Maratha protests were, first and foremost, against leaders and parties that derived their core strength from the community. “They are angry at the fact that, despite having political power, their socioeconomic conditions have not improved.” According to Santosh Kulkarni, a senior journalist from Nanded, the biggest impact of the Maratha protests in the assembly election will be faced by the children of senior Maratha leaders, such as Sreejaya Chavan, whose father, Ashok, and paternal grandfather, Shankarrao, were both former chief ministers. Sreejaya is defending a margin of almost a hundred thousand votes in her family’s pocket borough of Bhokar, in Nanded district. In February this year, the Chavans defected from the Congress to the BJP. Three months later, the BJP candidate for the Nanded Lok Sabha seat managed to lead the assembly segment by just 841 votes.
This year, the state legislature cleared a bill reserving ten percent of seats in government education and employment for the Maratha community, recognising them under the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes. In 2021, the Supreme Court had struck down a 16-percent quota on the grounds that it breached the ceiling of fifty percent it had set on total reservations. Meanwhile, Jarange demanded that Marathas be recognised as Kunbis—cultivators who should come under the OBC category. The demand for OBC status has fuelled tensions with various OBC leaders across the state, who see it as a threat not only to their communities’ access to education and jobs but also to their representation at the lower levels of government. “If there was a vacancy for an OBC seat in my Panchayat Samiti, the fear is that it would now be filled by Marathas who have got Kunbi status,” a Congress leader from Marathwada told me. In the aftermath of the general election, the government issued notifications and set up panels to provide Kunbi certificates to Maratha families. This has been perceived as a victory for Jarange Patil and the movement at large.
Dhananjay Munde, who represents Parli in the state assembly, told me that he believed the impact of the Maratha reservation would be minimal in this election, as many candidates across parties belonged to the community. Other local leaders agreed, pointing out that polarisation is harder to achieve in an assembly election with 288 constituencies than in a general election with only 48 seats. After deciding not to contest the election, Jarange Patil has also refrained from supporting any particular parties or candidates. He has said that the “community” knows whom to pick and whom to defeat.
Parli has been the bastion of the Munde family since the 1990s. Having faced Pankaja for the seat in the last two elections, Dhananjay is now up against a Maratha candidate fielded by the NCP(SP). “There is definitely an undercurrent of consolidation within the OBCs in the state, and the Mahayuti is going to benefit from this,” he told me. A local teacher, who did not want to be named because they were on election duty, said that Dhananjay had worked hard on the ground and was expected to win. “The casteism that we saw in the Lok Sabha [election] won’t happen this time,” they said.
The BJP has been reaching out to OBCs across the state in the lead up to the elections. In addition to focusing on its MaDhaVa formula—short for Mali (gardener), Dhangar (shepherd) and Vanjari (a semi-nomadic caste from Marathwada), it has also pursued smaller communities that have a sizeable vote share in individual constituencies. In its first list, the BJP named Chandrashekhar Bawankule as its candidate from Kamthi in Vidarbha. Bawankule, who belongs to the Teli community within the OBCs, was overlooked in 2019. The decision is said to have cost the party at least four Assembly seats in that election as the Teli community turned against the party.
However, some feel that dismissing the “Jarange factor” would be premature. “If it was not a factor, why did so many leaders line up at Antarwali Sarathi to meet with Jarange?” Mogal said. “Even Imtiaz Jaleel”—the state president of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen—“met him and lent his support to the Maratha reservation.” Mogal added that the Muslim community at large had supported the Maratha protesters.
The consolidation of Muslims along with Dalits and Marathas severely dented the electoral prospects of the Mahayuti in the Lok Sabha. There has since been a backlash against this consolidation, with the BJP preaching Hindu unity through slogans such as “batengein toh katengein”—divided we fall—and “ek hain toh safe hain”—We are safe if we are one.
Jarange Patil has been engaged in a heated exchange with several Mahayuti leaders over the past year. In a recent interview, he criticised the government’s stance on the issue of Maratha reservations. “A Hindu opposes us when we demand reservation,” he said, “but, when they have to target Muslims, they need Marathas to run after them with sticks.” The tensions escalated further during the final day of campaigning, when Kalicharan, a Hindu religious leader and internet personality, labelled Jarange Patil a “monster” who was intent on “breaking Hindutva.”
A local NCP leader in Marathwada told me that the party was uncomfortable with BJP leaders attacking the community, as it had historically enjoyed Maratha support across the region. They added that the impact could be seen in Beed, where Pankaja Munde lost by fewer than seven thousand votes. Pankaja has spoken out against the slogans being used against Marathas. “Frankly, my politics is different,” she told the Indian Express. “I won’t support it just because I belong to the same party. My belief is that we should work on development alone.”
Dhananjay told me that he hoped that the polarisation and divisions would reduce after the election. A local Congress leader in Beed, who is an OBC, said that the division that has taken place will take time to heal and can only happen once the elections are over. “We are not campaigning on the issue of reservations,” they said. “Marathwada is ready for a regime change, and the current agrarian crisis is the main issue at hand.”
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