Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Maharashtra): On 25 October 2024, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator Tushar Rathod, representing Mukhed in central Maharashtra’s Nanded district, was greeted at a campaign stop by a mob of angry Marathas.

The Marathas are a prominent Maharashtra community with a warrior heritage,  playing a key role in the formation of the Maratha empire in the 17th Century under warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, in whose name the BJP and the Shiv Sena often campaign. 

It was well past dusk as Rathod entered the village. Thousands of agitated Marathas began to shout slogans in the light of a halogen lamp and some torches. Hooting and whistling, the mob swelled perilously in the narrow lane. The two-term member of the legislative assembly (MLA), who belongs to a community categorised as other backward classes (OBC), left the village located in his own constituency without delivering a speech. 

On 7 November, about 100 men attacked a car in which OBC leader Laxman Hake was travelling. Hake was heading back after addressing a public meeting in the Loha assembly constituency, also in Nanded, for an OBC candidate belonging to a small outfit named the Janhit Party. 

Men attempted to climb on the bonnet of the SUV, whose rear windshield was damaged in the ensuing stone-throwing. “They shouted slogans of Ek Maratha-Lakh Maratha (every Maratha equals a hundred thousand),” Hake told television channels after he staged an immediate, impromptu protest on the road. “Will they even allow OBCs to cast their vote this election?”

These were among numerous recent skirmishes between candidates belonging to OBC communities and Maratha voters across the Marathwada region, a swathe of eight districts sprawled across 64,000 sq km, more than 43 times the size of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. This swathe of eight drought-prone districts is ground zero of the agitation demanding reservations in higher education and employment for Marathas. 

The incumbent government in the state, run by the ‘Mahayuti’ or coalition of the BJP, Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde faction) and the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar faction), has already granted a 10% reservation for Marathas.

This legislation was passed in February 2024, on the basis of a state backward class commission report that identified Marathas as ‘educationally and socially backward’. However, this politically powerful community has rallied for the last two years behind agitationist and farmer Manoj Jarange Patil who has been resolute in demanding that this quota be carved out from within the existing quota for OBCs, prompting a robust counter-mobilisation by the OBCs. 

Jarange Patil began to assert his leadership over the community in 2016, when his organisation, Shivba Sanghatana, shot into prominence in the aftermath of the rape and murder of a teenage Maratha girl. 

Why OBCs Are Restive

Paradoxically, Maharashtra, India’s richest state by size of economy, is also home to areas with high levels of poverty and wide gaps in consumption levels. 

Per capita average annual income in Maharashtra is Rs 242,247, below only Telangana, Haryana and Tamil Nadu, but structural inequality persists—an estimated 16.8% of the population is multidimensionally poor; and more than 12% is deprived in nutrition, sanitation and cooking fuel. 

Multidimensional poverty measures factors beyond income to provide a more representative and broad understanding of how the poor experience poverty, through disadvantages in health, nutrition, access to basic amenities, etc. Five of Marathwada’s eight districts feature among the state’s top 10 districts by percentage of population that is multidimensionally poor. 

The National Sample Survey Office’s Periodic Labour Force Survey assessed the overall unemployment rate in Maharashtra to be 3.3% in 2023-24, more or less the same as the national unemployment rate of 3.2% for the same period. Meanwhile, growth rate in the all-important agriculture sector has dipped from 4.5% in 2022-23 to 1.9% in 2023-24, alongside a dip in overall economic growth, inducing a deepening  jobs and income crisis.

Yet, in Marathwada, which sends 46 legislators to the 288-member Vidhan Sabha or lower house of the state legislature, candidates told Article 14 that caste divisions, more than ever before and more than any other factor, will determine the poll outcome, with votes—and people—cleaved sharply along community lines. 

Nearly 400 small and large communities in Maharashtra are listed as OBCs, together accounting for nearly 38% of the population. These groups are now galvanised by a single objective, to defend their quota in jobs and education from any erosion to accommodate the Marathas.

The latter are historically a land-owning community, well represented in politics, socially powerful and the single largest community in the state at nearly 32% of the population, in contrast to many OBC communities that have nomadic roots, caste-based social stratification, intergenerational poverty and lower overall socio-economic status.

“Not political party affiliations, not issues of agrarian crisis, nor the shortage of jobs,” said Madhav Nirmal, an independent candidate in Beed district’s Majalgaon assembly constituency. “The only thing voters want to know is which caste a candidate belongs to.”    

Nirmal, contesting his first election, has promised at election meetings that he will create 10,000 entrepreneurs in his constituency who will be job-creators. The large crowds at his rallies, however, are mobilised on caste affiliations alone. 

In the months after the Lok Sabha election result, when the Marathas’ anger at the BJP-led coalition led to its rout in the state, with the Mahayuti securing only 17 out of 48 seats, there were calls for economic boycotts of either community by the other in Marathwada. A string of violent confrontations between the Marathas and the OBCs continued too. Citizens said OBC children were being pulled out from schools owned by Marathas, 

Over two dozen teachers at government schools in Jalna district were found to have written objectionable posts about the opposite side on social media.

As tensions escalated, former union minister Sharad Pawar commented that the caste battle in Maharashtra could descend into a “Manipur-like situation”. 

“Maharashtra’s frenzied caste politics has become a negative-sum game, with growing numbers of groups claiming a shrinking pie,” said Ashoka Mody, former economic historian at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and author of India Is Broken. 

Mody said the deepening agricultural distress and few non-agrarian job options had led to a “ferocious scarcity of opportunity”, prompting people to want to assert claims based on inherited caste identities.

 “That this tragedy is occurring in one of India’s most industrially advanced states is a grim reminder of the severe developmental deficiencies plaguing India,” said Mody. “Unfortunately, there is no way out of this bad equilibrium.”

Deep Faultlines

OBC leader Baliram Khatke, formerly Maharashtra Navnirman Sena district president of Jalna district, said Maratha acquaintances and fellow villagers no longer share pleasantries with people belonging to OBC communities. “They won’t even take a ‘Ram Ram’ from us now,” he said. 

Khatke built a powerful local resistance by OBCs to Jarange Patil in Wadigodri village in Jalna, only 4 km from Antarwali Sarati, where the Maratha leader undertook a series of hunger strikes since 2022. 

Now associated with the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi led by Prakash Ambedkar, Khatke said he has never before witnessed such intense casteism in business and politics. 

“We did not vote along caste lines in 2019,” he said, adding that while the Lok Sabha election in the summer of 2024 saw the Marathas vote en masse against non-Maratha candidates in Marathwada, it was in the subsequent months that the social and political milieu of the region steadily deteriorated. 

Of Marathwada’s eight Lok Sabha seats, seven were won by Maratha candidates—the eighth, Latur, was reserved for a scheduled caste candidate. Of the winning eight, the opposition alliance or the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) comprising the Congress, the NCP (Sharad Pawar) and the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) picked up seven. The Mahayuti’s solitary MP from Marathwada was a Maratha, from the Shiv Sena (Shinde). 

“OBCs and Marathas no longer attend each other’s social events, neither weddings nor funerals,” said Khatke, whose wife Kaveri is the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi candidate from the Ghansawangi assembly constituency in Jalna district. “Even 10-year-olds are asking their classmates what caste they belong to.”

In the fray against Kaveri Khatke is Rajesh Tope, former Maharashtra minister and a sitting NCP (Sharad Pawar) legislator. 

In the course of a recent campaign speech, the OBC leader Laxman Hake told a crowd of thousands that Tope’s sugar factory had issued special permissions for Maratha workers to take a leave of absence in order to participate in Jarange Patil’s agitation. 

“Why are OBC workers not similarly permitted to attend our events?” Hake demanded. 

The 2016-17 ‘mook morchas’ or silent marches by lakhs of Marathas across the state witnessed nearly every major state leader participating, in solidarity with the Maratha community’s demands. OBCs in Marathwada, including from the three prominent OBC castes, Mali, Dhangar and Vanjari, told Article 14 that the 20 November election would be retribution time for such leaders who have not similarly expressed their overt support for the OBC cause.    

During his campaign rounds, Khatke was greeted in Jogaladevi village by a mob shouting, “Ek Maratha - Lakh Maratha”. The slogan, made popular during the 2016-17 agitation, has become a war cry of sorts in Marathwada, he said, particularly for the local Maratha power elite. 

For OBC candidates from smaller outfits, hearing the slogan usually meant it was either time to beat a hasty retreat, or willingly dive into a scuffle.       

‘The BJP Played A Cynical Game’

In May 2024, days after polling concluded for the Lok Sabha election and before counting day, some Vanjari community leaders from Mundhewadi village in Marathwada’s Beed district declared that a Rs-2,000 penalty would be imposed on OBC villagers who patronise Maratha shops, Maratha-run medical clinics and even Maratha-owned medical stores. 

The matter was quickly defused, with police intervention, senior political leaders assuaging angry OBCs, and with Jarange Patil claiming at the time that Marathas would not retaliate by resorting to such “low-level politics”. 

It was not the only instance of a deeply entrenched caste divide resurfacing.  

“Every day we would hear of violence, or see viral Facebook posts spewing hate against the opposite community,” said a taluka-level BJP leader from Beed who belongs to the Vanjari caste, speaking on condition of anonymity. With BJP legislator Pankaja Munde—the daughter of Gopinath Munde, one of Marathwada’s most famous OBC leaders—a Vanjari, being vanquished by Maratha voters in the Lok Sabha election, tensions continued to escalate for weeks.       

Emerging victorious in the Beed Lok Sabha constituency was Bajrang Sonawane of the NCP (Sharad Pawar). “Their cadre had used election slogans like Hataav Vanjari, Vaajva Tutari (defeat the Vanjari, play the tutari), a horn-like wind instrument from Maharashtra, the NCP-SP’s election symbol,” said the BJP leader. “Naturally, caste-based violent incidents followed.” 

A family home was attacked, there were incidents of stone-throwing by members of both communities over social media posts in the immediate aftermath of polling and results. In subsequent weeks, the OBC leader Hake undertook a fast to demand that chief minister Eknath Shinde, a Maratha, provide the OBCs an assurance that their existing quota would remain untouched.        

As his health deteriorated, his activists, supported by local OBC youth, staged vocal demonstrations, with rasta rokos  (road blockades), marches and vandalism in various parts of Jalna and Beed districts. According to Khatke, much of these protests were organic, spurred by local village rivalries with Marathas, the wealthier and more powerful caste that was historically an oppressor to many lower castes.   

Former political science professor at the Savitribai Phule University in Pune and chief editor of Studies in Indian Politics, Suhas Palshikar said it was clear that the incumbent government in Maharashtra, particularly the Shiv Sena led by Eknath Shinde and the Bharatiya Janata Party, had “played a cynical game of setting one group off against another”, mobilising the OBC communities individually in what was actually an anti-Maratha strategy. 

Palshikar told Article 14 it was a sad comment on a state considered to be progressive that all parties had succumbed to misleading the Marathas, beginning in the UPA period when the Marathas were first given reservations even though it was apparent that the quota would not stand in the courts. 

“All parties in a way are responsible for the current situation,” Palshikar said, “although the current worsening is the doing of the Mahayuti government.”

Co-director of Lokniti, a think tank that researches democratic politics, Palshikar said developments in Maharashtra suggested that caste and religious identities, had become a symbolic last-resort in times of agrarian distress and overall economic struggles for rural populations. 

“It is a proxy—an easy to comprehend one—to present an emotional identity in place of more complex processes at work that have worsened economic conditions generally,” he said. The rural population is trapped as agrarian incomes dwindle with no other sources of income in sight, and if they choose to relocate to an urban setting, they find themselves further trapped.

“In both cases, they are prompted to search for an enemy,” said Palshikar.     

Mody, a former World Bank and International Monetary Fund economist, said the easiest thing for political parties was to “don the cynical garb of social justice by making caste-based job reservation promises—and increasingly untenable promises of handouts.” The development agenda would suffer as a consequence, he warned, as issues like education, public health, livable cities, a fair judiciary and environmental protection suffer neglect. 

“Absent that development agenda, which would allow people to stand on their own feet, economic distress will keep compounding, caste-based politics of reservations and a bidding war on handouts will become ever-more the norm,” said Mody. “Material progress and social justice will remain  grievously impaired.” 

Cooler, Cooker & Election Games 

On the morning of 10 November, Madhav Ambadas Nirmal, contesting elections to the Maharashtra state assembly from the Majalgaon assembly constituency in central Maharashtra’s Beed district, received a call from a team-member. 

The morning newspapers in Majalgaon town had come with a pamphlet inserted, appearing at first glance to be promotional material from his own campaign team but actually bearing his photograph, a name confusingly like his own, Mahadev Ambadas Nirmal, and an incorrect election symbol. It urged readers to vote in large numbers for the ‘cooler’; Nirmal’s symbol is a ‘cooker’. 

Nirmal, an independent OBC candidate belonging to the Dhangar caste, is a strong contender for the Majalgaon seat, with as many as 130,000 OBCs among the constituency’s 300,000 voters. 

An industrialist who declared assets worth Rs 47 crore in his election affidavit, Nirmal’s supporters quickly investigated at the newspaper distribution agency and zeroed in on a man who appeared to be a supporter of Prakash Solanke, a former minister and four-time MLA from Majalgaon, now contesting on a ticket from the NCP (Ajit Pawar). 

Nirmal’s team registered a police complaint and an FIR was lodged. 

“It is a pity that local politics has become so dirty—those who have cemented their positions in power over decades will try every trick to stop me,” he said. 

The FIR was lodged against an unnamed printing establishment and Atul Solanke, a Majalgaon resident.  

It was not Nirmal’s first brush with the rough and tumble of local politics in the shadow of the Maratha agitation. On 1 November, his car and a fleet of campaign vehicles were stopped as they tried to drive past Pahadi Dahiphal village in Dharur taluka. Sloganeering Marathas asked the campaign party to return. 

His supporters filed a police complaint at the Dharur police station against those who forced their campaign vehicles to return. 

At the start of his campaign, he spoke at a public event about why his phone had been ‘unreachable’ over the course of the last days for withdrawing nominations. “From threats to throw me in jail to pleas and requests, they tried everything to make me withdraw,” he said. He had sought a ticket from the NCP, he said, but the parties had chosen to field “their own”.  

According to locals, the incumbent MLA Solanke may finish third or fourth in Majalgaon, with Nirmal and the NCP (Sharad Pawar) candidate Mohan Jagtap appearing to be ahead. Solanke and Jagtap are both Marathas. A third Maratha, Ramesh Adaskar, is seen as a contender too.        

A Woman Sarpanch Vs 3 Marathas

In the neighbouring Georai assembly constituency, also in Beed district, the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi candidate is Priyanka Khedkar, a Vanjari by caste and sarpanch (elected head) of Chaklamba village. “In one village, they (Marathas) demanded to know why we didn’t have the bhagwa jhenda (saffron flag) in our rallies,” said Khedkar. “How has a saffron flag become a symbol of the Marathas?” 

The Georai assembly seat is a prime example of the Marathas’ dominance in Marathwada’s politics. For almost four decades, from 1978 onwards, various members of a single family of Marathas represented Georai in the legislature, first Shivaji Ankushrao Pandit as a Congress MLA, followed by Badamrao Pandit who had three terms (once as an independent, twice from the united NCP) and Amarsinh Pandit (of the BJP).    

“A single family of Marathas established their reign over this assembly constituency,” said a senior campaign strategist in Khedkar’s team, “and they don’t want OBCs to contest because Marathas are now backward?”  

The Marathas, in voting out Pankaja Munde over caste hatred, had lost Beed district a likely union cabinet minister, he said. Meanwhile, the BJP’s incumbent MLA from Georai, Laxman Pawar, also a Maratha, was benched to avoid an anti-incumbency vote, the Khedkar team member said. Hailed locally by party workers as ‘karyasamrat’ (king of action), Pawar is contesting as an independent.  

Khedkar faces Badamrao Pandit, now with the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) and former MLA Amarsinh Pandit’s younger brother Vijaysinh Pandit of the NCP (Ajit Pawar), in what will be a closely contested three-way Maratha Vs OBC fight. The daughter-in-law of a former Zilla Parishad leader from Chaklamba, Khedkar has taken on the Pandits’ kin in previous local body elections, and will be reviving a long-standing Maratha-OBC rivalry.     

Khedkar, who has BSc and BEd degrees, said a Dalit-Muslim-OBC axis could ensure a win for many OBC candidates, but the more powerful players had “managed” some OBC candidates.

Across several constituencies in Marathwada, including Partur in Jalna district, Ahmadpur in Latur district, Jintur in Parbhani, the Latur Rural assembly seat, in Parli and Ashti-Patoda in Beed district, Gangakhed in Parbhani and Kalamnuri in Hingoli district, Maratha candidates are taking on OBC candidates, in a similar atmosphere of hostility.  

 “Whatever the outcome,” Khedkar said, “You can be certain that it is the Maratha agitation led by Jarange Patil, and that alone, that has caused such a volatile election atmosphere in Marathwada.”   

(Kavitha Iyer is a senior editor with Article 14 and the author of ‘Landscapes of Loss’, a book on India’s farm crisis.)  

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