If Maratha activist Manoj Jarange Patil drops a hint of supporting or opposing a particular coalition on the eve of polling on November 20, things may change overnight.
Just a month after it suffered reverses in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led alliance, Mahayuti, made a comeback of sorts. In the legislative council polls for 11 seats, Mahayuti won 9.
While the cross-voting by half-a-dozen Congress MLAs grabbed the headlines, what flew under the radar was the caste matrix of the winning candidates, especially of those fielded by the BJP.
Four of its five winners were non-Maratha. One of them was Pankaja Munde, daughter of the late Gopinath Munde, arguably the tallest OBC leader in the state.
A couple of months later on October 9, a day after the BJP retained power in Haryana, led by OBC Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, the National Commission for Backward Classes recommended the inclusion of 19 castes and sub-castes from Maharashtra in the central list of OBCs. The move was seen as fulfilling the long-pending demand of those communities.
On October 10, the Maharashtra cabinet approved a proposal to request the Centre to raise the income limit to qualify for non-creamy layer to Rs 15 lakh per year from the current Rs 8 lakh, a step seen as a symbolic gesture to the OBC communities at broadening quota benefits. Ahead of the elections in Haryana, Saini had increased the income limit from Rs 6 lakh to Rs 8 lakh.
Poll watchers, however, believe cobbling up a non-Maratha rainbow caste combination, particularly of the OBCs, would be a tough task in Maharashtra.
In Haryana, just months ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP replaced its Punjabi-Khatri Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar with Saini, an OBC. He was given a free hand.
Because the Ahir-Saini voters are somewhat concentrated in certain parts of Haryana, that move may have benefited the BJP.
However, in Maharashtra, the party does not have a pan-Maharashtrian OBC face to project. Moreover, there is no such thing as an OBC vote bank in Maharashtra, says Kedar Naik, professor of political science, Ajeenkya D Y Patil University, Pune.
And that's where, according to Naik, schemes like Ladki Bahin might play a role. Rather than committing to a singular social identity of caste, Mahayuti seems to have attempted to appeal to a broader economic base keeping in mind the women voters political agency, he adds.
The slew of back-to-back OBC-focused political manoeuvres just ahead of the elections to the 288-member Maharashtra assembly, say political observers, stem from the BJP-led alliance's wariness of the strategic voting by the culturally dominant Maratha community against its candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Perhaps taking a cue from the setback, the BJP seems to have fallen back on its pre-2014 strategy of consolidating its base among the non-dominant castes, particularly among the OBCs.
According to a government-appointed panel, Marathas make up 28 per cent of Maharashtra's population. As many as 12 of the 20 chief ministers in the state belonged to this community.
The 2024 Lok Sabha polls saw sharp polarisation of Maratha and OBC votes across Maharashtra, particularly in Marathwada, where the BJP-led alliance could win only one of the eight seats.
What led to this huge Maratha mobilisation was a police lathi-charge on an indefinite hunger strike led by Maratha quota activist Manoj Jarange-Patil in Jalna district in September 2023.
Jarange, a product of the 58-odd muk morchas (silent marches) led by the Maratha community across the state, has been in protest mode for the past two years demanding reservation for the Marathas under the OBC category.
What has confounded political activists and social scientists alike is the absence of what they call social movement fatigue in Jarange's protest.
An activist closely associated with the Maratha quota protest said: "He (Jarange) dresses up like a rangda (a colloquial term for rustic) Maratha. He doesn't ask anything for himself. He is perceived by the masses as someone who doesn't cut deals with politicians. He is fighting with an indefatigable spirit for the Maratha cause."
According to sources, Jarange wields huge influence in all the 43 assembly seats of Marathwada and an extended influence in some districts of Western Maharashtra. These two regions together have given Maharashtra nine chief ministers -- eight Marathas and a Dalit from the Congress.
Weeks before the Election Commission announced polling dates in Maharashtra, politicians cutting across party lines, made a beeline to meet Jarange at his village Antarwali Sarati, the nerve centre of the quota protest.
Conspicuously present were ministers and candidates of the BJP-led alliance. This move, according to sources, was to pacify Jarange in the hope that he could help avert Maratha mobilisation against them in some constituencies.
In his speeches, Jarange deploys jargon associated with Maratha warrior-king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj with popular appeal. In the run-up to the filing of nominations for the assembly polls, Jarange created a flutter by declaring his candidates would contest. Then, on November 4, the last day of nomination withdrawals, he asked all of them to drop out.
All this, Jarange said, was ganimi kawa (a term denoting guerilla tactics used extensively in historiography of Shivaji Maharaj). This, sources say, was his way to keep all political parties guessing until the last minute.
Beyond the Maratha built-up, the Congress-led alliance Mahavikas Aghadi counts on what election watchers in the region say is the unbeatable Maratha-Muslim-Mahar combination. Mahar is a dominant scheduled caste to which B R Ambedkar belonged.
Jarange-Patil has been continuously taking a stand against the BJP, particularly maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis. Overall, in Marathwada and Western Maharashtra, the Maratha-Muslim-Mahar combination had solidly backed the MVA in Lok Sabha. This broad consolidation is still intact.
In straight contests against the BJP, there is certainly going to be a Maratha consolidation in favour of the MVA, says Bhausaheb Ajabe, an office-bearer of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress, from the region.
Cotton and soybean farmers in the region are selling the cash crops at a price far below the MSP, says Ajabe, adding the agrarian distress would have an impact on electoral outcomes as well.
To fend off the possible Maratha consolidation, the BJP has fielded legacy Maratha candidates like former CM Ashok Chavan's daughter Sreejaya from Bhokar in Nanded and former Union minister Raosaheb Danve's son Santosh Danve from Bhokardan in Jalna. Danve's daughter, too, is contesting on a Shiv Sena (Shinde) ticket from Kannad in Aurangabad.
With their committed votes, the BJP hopes its legacy Maratha candidates would help it split the Maratha votes, while shoring up its own non-Maratha base of upper castes and OBCs, primarily Mali, Dhangar and Vanjari (Madhav) castes.
The party expects that the presence of Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, both Marathas, would blunt the edge of quota protest ire against the party, say sources.
In Maratha versus Maratha contests, where winning margins could be narrow, the Jarange factor may tilt the scales.
According to sources, it all depends on what the Maratha quota activist does in the next few days, if he drops a hint of supporting or opposing a particular coalition on the eve of polling on November 20, things may change overnight.
The movers and shakers
With 43 and 58 assembly seats respectively, Marathwada and Western Maharashtra can make or break governments in the state.
Western Maharashtra, dotted with milk cooperatives, sugar factories and fertile land, is seen as a prosperous region. But Marathwada lags behind.
Until a decade ago, both regions were a Congress-NCP (undivided) bastion. After 2014, the BJP-Shiv Sena (undivided) strategically made inroads in the regions.
