WOO AND WIN

Recent developments have split the Maratha vote. The party that better articulates its engagement with the community's concerns stands to benefit

- KAVITHA IYER

On the morning of November 4, only hours after he declared at a news conference, sniffling and in tears, that the time was right for Marathas to exact vengeance on the Maharashtra government for the economic hardships heaped on the agrarian community, Manoj Jarange Patil returned to face the news crews again. “It is not possible to contest on the basis of only one community,” he said. Muslim and dalit parties, who he had been in talks with until 3am, had not sent lists of candidates they were to jointly back.

Across the Marathwada region of Maharashtra, scores of Maratha candidates who had filed their nomination papers for the November 20 assembly elections were directed to withdraw from the fray. To a question on who or which party/alliance he would direct Maratha voters to reject, Jarange Patil said he would spell out his mandate soon.

Even without an edict from the leader of a series of statewide agitations seeking reservations for Marathas from within the Other Backward Classes quota, the morning announcement on the last date for withdrawal of nominations was an inflection point.

The anger of the Maratha community—almost 31 per cent of the state’s population—is considered one of the biggest factors in the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA’s poor show in the Lok Sabha elections this summer.

Amid the post-Haryana election political tailwinds for the Mahayuti combine of the BJP, the Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde faction) and the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar faction), Jarange Patil’s announcement indicated the possibility of a repeat, at least in some regions, of what the Maratha leader himself acknowledged as the Lok Sabha pattern.