Continued from the second part
Former Congress chief minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan, was the first to polarize the Marathas against the OBCs. Later, in 2016-17, Devendra Fadnavis did the same to benefit the BJP. However, Fadnavis managed to keep the Marathas in check. Hundreds of thousands of people took part in demonstrations, there was fear in the air, but such a situation wasn’t allowed to take a violent turn. But the OBCs still gave a big jolt to Fadnavis in the 2019 elections. That was because his government had a Bill granting reservations to the Marathas passed in the Assembly. Fadnavis lost 17 seats, his chief ministership and his party was unseated from the government. He drew the right lessons, did away with his pro-Maratha stance and came out with a new slogan to please the OBCs. He declared that the OBCs were a part of the BJP’s DNA.
In 2022, Fadnavis engineered the fall of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government led by Uddhav Thackeray and a new government led by Eknath Shinde came to power. Sharad Pawar crafted the Jarange factor to hijack the Maratha reservation issue. Jarange was made to observe hunger strikes at Vadi-Godri and Aantarvali Sarati. Initially, Manoj Jarange could not garner much support and the media, too, ignored him. But as Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) began propping him up, his hunger strikes began getting more prominence.
As the hunger strike continued, Fadnavis, who was the deputy chief minister and the home minister, tried to use the police to end the protest. Sharad Pawar, even when he is not in power, has a hold on the administration. He made his men join the protest and ensured a clash with the cops.
After this clash, the people present at the strike venue dispersed and Jarange ended his hunger strike. But Rajesh Tope, appointed by Pawar to oversee the Jarange factor, drove to Jarange’s residence and persuaded him to relaunch his hunger strike. Tope used his party’s network for backing Jarange.
The violence and the tension in the air was generating lots of stories for the media and Jarange’s hunger strike came as a godsend. To boost TRP, the strike was given a lot of publicity. This got into Jarange’s head. He began hurling expletives at the OBC leaders. He used absolutely indecent language to insult Fadnavis and chief minister Shinde. “Bury them, pull them down, crush them, teach them a lesson” – Jarange kept on vomiting these kinds of phrases day in, day out.
On the day Jarange began his fast in Aantarvali Sarati, OBC leader Ravindra Tonge began his fast too in Chandrapur. But in Chandrapur, the presence of media personnel, politicians and government servants at Tonge’s event was meagre. The Dalit, OBC and progressive-leftwing leaders, who sat at the feet of Jarange to extend their support to the agitation, did not care to visit Chandrapur to back the OBC protest. The media ignored it completely mainly because it was democratic and peaceful. There was no vandalism, no violence. How would it raise TRP? No media means no publicity. Hence Dalit and progressive leaders, too, did not visit the venue of the protest in Chandrapur.
Jarange took a dig at the Dalit, OBC, progressive and left-wing leaders, who had joined him in his hunger strike. Jarange said, “The Dalit, Adivasi and OBC people are worthless. But because they get reservations, we Marathas of 96 clans, we the superior people, have to work under these nincompoops. This is a matter of great shame for the Marathas.” The Dalit, OBC and progressive leaders, who had gone to support Jarange, readily accepted this abject insult, proving how thick-skinned they were.
Be that as it may, this was followed by Sharad Pawar’s visit to the constituencies of Chhagan Bhujbal and Dhananjay Munde, where he delivered anti-OBC speeches, upping the ante – this when no elections were due in these constituencies. All this encouraged Jarange. His supporters reduced to ashes a grand hotel worth Rs 8 crore owned by Samta Parishad leader Subhash Raut in Beed. OBC MLA Sandeep Kshirsagar’s house was set on fire, which would have burnt his wife, children and elderly parents alive had it not been for a Muslim neighbour who risked his life, entered the burning house and saved them. In the Madha constituency, homes of Nai (OBC) families in Tulsi village were burnt down. Men and women were mercilessly thrashed. To strike terror in the hearts of the OBCs, hair-cutting salons of the members of the Nai community were vandalized in Gangamasla village of Majalgaon tehsil in Pankaja Munde’s constituency. In Beed town, Shubham Jewellers, a shop owned by the Lolge family of the Sunar (OBC) caste, was set afire.
Reports of abusing and attacking – throwing ink on – doctors, professors and other intellectuals, who supported reservations for the OBCs or opposed Jarange through their posts on social media, began pouring in from village after village. Educational institutions owned by the Marathas sacked some OBC professors. This terrorized not only OBC activists but also ordinary OBC people.
The clouds of fear dissipated with Chhagan Bhujbal organizing a mega ‘Kranti Sabha’ of the OBCs at Ambad on 17 November 2023. The OBCs heaved a sigh of relief. For this, Bhujbal had to resign from the council of ministers. However, in view of the popular support Bhujbal enjoyed and given his aggressive posturing, neither Chief Minister Shinde nor the two Deputy Chief Ministers Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar could gather the courage to accept his resignation.
Every informed person knows that it was Sharad Pawar who polarized the Marathas against the OBCs. In the 2024 Assembly elections, safety in the face of Maratha aggression was the key issue before the OBCs. Needless to say, had MVA come to power, its government would have been under the thumb of Sharad Pawar. When Sharad Pawar, without being in power, could use the Jarange factor to whip up violence, with the government under his control, he could have done much more. The OBCs felt that Pawar’s backing would make the Jarange factor even more violent and that caste violence along the lines of Manipur and Haryana in the state would lead to an existential crisis for the community. That is the reason the first priority of the OBCs was to give a sound drubbing to the Sharad Pawar-led MVA in the polls and hand over power to the BJP-led Mahayuti. Their second priority was to ensure that Fadnavis became chief minister. The OBCs felt that with Fadnavis at the helm, they would be safe because even as home minister he had tried to curb the Jarange factor. That was the reason Jarange had branded him as a villain for the Marathas. So, as per the formulation that “even a Brahmin is preferable to a Maratha”, the OBCs were keen to see Fadnavis occupy the chief minister’s post. This made them vote for even the Maratha candidates of the BJP and ensure victories with huge margins for the Maratha parties in the Maha Yuti – Shinde’s Shiv Sena and Ajeet Pawar’s NCP. They were well aware that the BJP would come to power only if the Maha Yuti won a majority; that an OBC tsunami in favour of the BJP would weaken Shinde’s claim to chief ministership and Fadnavis would head the new government.
Thus, unlike Jarange, the OBCs did not turn completely hostile against any particular caste. In fact, the OBCs even rejected the OBC candidates fielded by Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi because had they won, they would have taken orders from Prakash Ambedkar, who has been a firm supporter of Jarange from Day One and still is.
During the campaign for the elections, Prakash Ambedkar did make some perfunctory statements backing the OBCs. But the OBCs knew that once elections were done with, he would side with Jarange against them. How could the OBCs forget that Prakash Ambedkar had openly backed Jarange on the ‘Sage-Soyre’ (that Marathas should be given reservation within the OBC quota and not separately) issue? No wonder most of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi candidates ended up forfeiting their deposits in the elections. The OBC voters have taught all leaders who backed Jarange a lesson they won’t forget in their lifetime.
Most of the journalists, scholars and politicians analyzing the defeat of MVA and the victory of Maha Yuti are focusing on inconsequential issues like EVMs, the Ladli-Behna scheme and distribution of cash. I will deliberate on the tug of war between the different constituent parties of the Maha Yuti in the formation of the government, the real reasons behind it and the next step of the OBCs in the fourth part of my analysis.
(Translation from the Hindi by Amrish Herdenia)
