New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) calculations ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections have come under threat due to escalating protests over Maratha reservation in Maharashtra.
The two opposing groups that have emerged from the agitation have remained unyielding as the protests in the state intensified last week with Manoj Jarange-Patil announcing that he has given up water and intravenous support.
While a set of protesters are demanding reservations for the entire Maratha community that are currently classified as general, Kunbis and other OBC groups that fall under the other backward classes umbrella have opposed their demand to be included in the same category as them.
Patil’s move was an attempt to put more pressure on the government to accept his demand of bringing the entire community under the OBC category.
However, OBC groups and Kunbis – the subset of the Maratha community that is already classified as backward – fear that the dominant community that makes up roughly a third of the state’s population will eat into their share, the Hindustan Times reported.
On Monday (September 18), Kunbi and other OBC leaders carried out a march in Nagpur against including Marathas in the OBC list. The state government is trying to get the OBC community to call off the stir and chief minister Eknath Shinde is likely to meet OBC leaders this week, the Economic Times reported.
However, Rashtriya OBC Maha Sangh president B. Taywade has said the community would not call off the agitation easily. The OBC groups said they are not willing to ‘give up our share of reservation for anyone else’. If the government wants to give reservation to the Maratha community, it should consider giving it from the open category,” he was quoted by the Hindustan Times as saying.
The BJP-Shiv Sena government had called an all party meeting last week after being stuck in a deadlock with the protesters for nearly three weeks.
In addition to the ongoing protests, the Dhangar community has also begun an agitation demanding that it be given a Scheduled Tribe status, the Economic Times report said.