The end of Maratha power?

The Assembly election in Maharashtra will likely shatter the MarathaCongress hegemony beyond repair An early indicator of this is that out of the 15 MLAs and an MP winging away from the CongressNationalist Congress Party combine nearly 38 are Marathas who chose either the Bharatiya Janata Party or Shiv Sena as their dovecotes It was on the Maratha support and leadership that the Congress domination had been based for decadesThe meltdown of the MarathaCongress hegemony has been a long time coming Political scientist Suhas Palshikar traces its origin to Sharad Pawar splitting the Congress in 1978 and then again after his return to the party in 1999 These fragmented the Maratha elite and the Congress support base Reservation for the Other Backward Classes in 1990 caused heartburn among ordinary Marathas They became susceptible to the emerging Hindutva narrative as was true of most elite social groups countrywideThe division of Maratha votes first surfaced in the 1995 Assembly election By 2004 the CongressNCP together bagged just 33 of Maratha votes as against 57 the BJPRSS received according to the LoknitiCSDS election data The 2004 voting pattern of Marathas has barely changed since then To reverse this trend the CongressNCP government introduced reservation for the Marathas in 2014 Its decision didnt pass judicial scrutiny as the data furnished to establish the social backwardness of Marathas was deemed scantyThis lacuna was plugged by the Devendra Fadnavis government which appointed the Gaikwad Commission to carry out socioeconomic surveys The Commissions report became the basis for granting reservation to the Marathas The report was egregiously flawed as it mistakes economic backwardness for social backwardness which is the only Constitutional basis to provide reservationYet ironically the Bombay High Court upheld the reservation for Marathas It didnt find the creation of a new category of socially and educationally backward class to accommodate Marathas tendentious This was shocking given that the existing OBC category already consisted of castes identified as socially and educationally backward Even the Supreme Court did not stay the governments sleight of hand The judicial action will likely fell the CongressNCP which will find hard to wean away Marathas from those who fulfilled their demand for reservationPerhaps the CongressNCP had the option of threatening the BJPs base of the OBCs For instance they could have argued that the removal of the 50 cap on reservation to accommodate Marathas should be preceded by increasing the 19 quota for OBCs to 40 which is their estimated share in the states population Their share was lowered because the Mandal Commission did not wish to violate several court orders limiting reservation to 50This option the CongressNCP couldnt exercise as it would have undermined their Maratha leaders This exposes a stress in the leadership structure particularly the Congress Maratha leaders are failing to attract the support of their community which is onethird of the electorate yet their insecurity has them circumscribe leaders from subaltern groups Not surprisingly 31 of the CongressNCP deserters are OBCsIn 2019 53 percent of Adivasis voted for the CongressNCP Yet it has lost Nirmala Gavit to the Sena She is the daughter of Manikrao Gavit who was elected to the Lok Sabha on the Congress ticket nine times He was made a minister under UPAI but was dropped in 2008 Think of the signal the Congress sent when it won the 2004 Assembly election under Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde a Dalit yet replaced him by Vilasrao Deshmukh a MarathaIn 2019 87 percent of Muslims voted for the CongressNCP yet they dont have a leader of the stature of say the late AR Antulay Community leaders crib that the Congress favours Muslim migrants over Marathi Muslims Was this why Congress MLA Abdul Sattar shifted to Sena which along with the BJP targets MuslimsInsecurity gnaws the Maratha leaders as they didnt build but inherited their support base They are neither pugnacious nor skilled in stemming the shrinking of their own base let alone that of the Congress Their survival depends on aborting the emergence of an alternative leadership structure Regardless of Hindutvas allure it is incredible that the CongressNCP has failed to exploit the disquiet over agrarian distress and a slowing economyIt might seem Monday Blues is prematurely predicting the election results Remember legislators switch parties because they can sniff the direction in which the wind is blowing They seldom get it wrong as nearly 50 of the electorate decides on its vote even before the election dates are announced successive LoknitiCSDS election studies show Under a BJPheaded government the Marathas will be accommodated but not get to rule It does seem the end of the road for their hegemony unless community pride hasMaratha voters behave contrary to expectationsThe writer is a journalistThe views expressed in this column are the 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