Kunbi, Maratha bhai-bhai?

In 1990 when the VP Singhled government accepted the Mandal Commission report providing 27 per cent reservation to Other Backward Classes OBCs the Maratha community of Maharashtra felt cheated and alienatedThe Marathas had been excluded from the list leading to extreme unrest within the community What followed was a threedecadelong stir for reservation both in jobs and education which came to a boil earlier this month when a sitin protest and hunger strike by Maratha activist and farmer Manoj JarangePatil turned violent in Jalna leading to 40 police personnel and civilians being injuredCM Eknath Shinde meets farmer and Maratha activist Manoj JarangePatil who has been on a hunger strike for the demand of reservation in Antarwali Sarati village of Jalna district JarangePatil called off his strike on Thursday PicPTIAmidst high drama JarangePatil demanded that Marathas be given a Kunbi certificate a subcaste recognised as OBC so that the Marathas can get an OBC concession He refused to break his fast until the demand was met On Thursday JarangePatil finally ended his hunger strike after CM Eknath Shinde personally visited him fed him orange juice and assured to resolve the issueMaratha Mahasangh leader Virendra Pawar says the community has long been disillusioned by the reservation policySenior journalist Pratap Asabe who hails from Solapur one of the cities that has a large Maratha population feels that reservation might do a disservice to the community PicSatej ShindeldquoInitially the Maratha community had opposed it because it was castebased We felt that reservation in both educational institutions and jobs should be given on economic parameters and for those who qualify as lsquoeconomically weakrsquo But nobody paid heed to our demandrdquo he says over a phone callldquoSince the only way to get any reservation was via caste the then Maratha leader Shashikanth Pawar demanded that the state government declare the Marathas as Kunbisrdquo he explainsVirendra Pawar Prakash Shengde and Dr Anita Rane KothareThe Kunbi community which was included in the OBC list by the Mandal Community is largely agrarian According to Dr Anita RaneKothare head of department of Ancient Indian Culture and Archaeology at St Xavierrsquos College the Kunbis are a group of people who originally resided in the Marathwada and Vidarbha regions that today are part of Maharashtra ldquoThey belonged to the farming community and their main occupation was agriculturerdquo she says In the Hindu social order they are part of the third varna which is the Vaishyas and were hence considered a lower casteHow then are they related to the Marathas who comprise 35 per cent of the statersquos population and were traditionally known to be part of the warrior clanmdashkshatriyasmdashfrom the western Deccan plateau ldquoAt some point some of the Kunbis travelled to Sahyadris in search of a livelihood They settled on the Deccan plateau where they received farming opportunities working for landowners Thatrsquos when they came in contact with Chhatrapati Shivaji who enlisted them into the army that he was buildingrdquo says RaneKothare These members of the Kunbi group were elevated to the status of Kshatriyas were given lands as jagir and came to be identified as MarathasThe demand for Kunbi certificates to Marathas received renewed attention after the Supreme Court in 2021 set aside the state governmentrsquos law for Maratha reservationBack in 2018 the Devendra Fadnavisled state government pushed for inclusion of the Marathas in the OBC category As per news reports the Maharashtra State Backward Class Commission which submitted its report on the social and economic conditions of the community had at the time recommended that reservation be granted to them without disturbing the quota granted to OBCThe government had proposed giving 16 per cent reservation to the Marathas but the Bombay High Court brought it down to 13 per cent in jobs and 12 per cent in education The Supreme Court however quashed it stating that the reservation in the state could not cross the limit of 50 per centDuring his sitin protest JarangePatil alluded to a certificate given to Marathas hailing from the Marathwada region of Maharashtra which was part of the Nizamruled Hyderabad state until 1948 The certificate he claimed mentioned them as lsquoKunbirsquo JarangePatil has demanded that the certificate now be extended to every MarathaOn Thursday a state representative said that a team of serving and retired officials of the Maharashtra government and language experts would be visiting Hyderabad to look for Nizamera documents related to the Kunbi community living in the Marathwada region Based on the documents the Maharashtra government will decide whether to give Kunbi caste certificates to the Marathas whose ancestors were described as Kunbi in Nizamera documents according to news reports ldquoMaratha is Kunbi and vice versa so the demand is valid and so is Jarangersquos request that all Maratharsquos be given this certificaterdquo says PawarOne of the criticisms against the Maratha community is that many of them are landowning and politically influential Pratap Asabe a senior independent journalist who hails from Solapur one of the cities that has a large Maratha population says ldquoGrowing up in Solapur the elders or the educated among the Maratha community would often take care of educating the children in the city and surround areasrdquo His grandfather he says was taught by one of them ldquoand that is why my father and then my siblings and I benefited from the samerdquo ldquoBut in the past few decades the Maratha youth have fallen behind This is because the land parcel their family depended upon has remained the same but the mouths to be fed have increasedrdquo As a result a lot of Marathas have only five acres of agricultural land for each family he saysWhile Asabe does not deny that a large fraction of the Maratha community needs help he feels that reservation might be a disservice to the people ldquoHistory has shown us that when a particular community or caste gets reservation they get extremely communal This means that they do not mingle with people from other communities and that there are no marriages between two communitiesrdquoInstead he says that therersquos a need for Marathaspecific educational policies so that they do not have to compete to get admission ldquoWe also need to carry out a review of industries that do not have Maratha representationrdquo he adds He fears that we might be missing the forest for the trees ldquoWe have an extremely serious issue of lack of government jobs because government after government is not keen on creating jobs and is instead favouring privatisationrdquoExNCP MLA and OBC Sangharsh Samanvay Samiti president Prakash Shendge has vehemently opposed the Maratha demand He says the OBCs ldquohave got the 27 per cent quota after generational suffering and injusticesrdquo ldquoWe still have people from the OBC category who are playing catch up We have faced abuse to the point that people took a shudhikaran bath because they saw our facerdquo he says Members of the OBC category will be carrying out a ldquolakhacha morchardquo outside Mantralaya in October to protest extending the quota to the MarathasAccording to Asabe and Pawar what we currently need is a caste census which will enable both the state and the Centre to take decisions based on data ratherthan sentimentIn the last 75plus years India has carried out seven censuses but none have been able to replicate the work of JH Hutton Hutton was obsessed with the indigenous people of India An anthropologist by training and a civil servant during the British rule his interest in documenting the people of the Indian subcontinent led to him being appointed as the Census Commissioner of India At the age of 46 he took on the colossal task of heading the only recorded caste census This was in 1931The Mandal Commission which was formed in 1979 also relied on data from 1931Carrying out a census of this nature and scale will always come with its own challenges Political interference for starters Like Hutton mentioned in his 1931 census report ldquohellipalthough they Congress leaders do not seem to have regarded a census as objectionable in itself the opportunity for harassing the government seemed too good to be missed and January 1931 was notified by the Congress Committee to be observed as Census Boycott Sunday This boycott was not however taken up with any real enthusiasm and had very little ultimate effect on the taking of the census but the petty annoyances resignations and interferences with the preparations for final enumeration very greatly increased the work the responsibilities and the anxieties of local officers in charge of census workrdquoWith inputs by Jane Borges