OBC (other backward classes) leader Chhagan Bhujbal's revelation that he had tendered his resignation from the Maharashtra Cabinet way back in November has unwittingly revealed the quota strategy of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Deputy Chief Minister (Dy CM) Devendra Fadnavis' immediate statement that Bhujbal’s resignation was not accepted suggests that the BJP is playing a clever balancing game between the Marathas and the OBCs, two communities that have been on the verge of a confrontation with respect to the issue of reservations.
His statement conceals more than it reveals. The BJP can ill afford any move or suggestion that is contrarian to the interests of the OBCs, a constituency it has assiduously built over the decades whilst facing the dominance of the Marathas who have usually been on the side of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
Interestingly, Bhujbal's leader and his party's chief, Ajit Pawar (the other deputy chief minister) is either sidelined or insignificant in the resignation drama. Ideally, Bhujbal should have given the letter to Ajit but forwarded it directly to the CM. It is not so innocent an act.
And Fadnavis, being just the Dy CM, should not have any role in it, but he is seen as the sutradhaar. And therein lies a tale.
Observing Bhujbal, Shinde, and Fadnavis
There have been wheels within wheels in the present Maharashtra dispensation. It is running like a circus. The ringmaster is in New Delhi. He is always on the hotline with Fadnavis. The trapeze artists have been good performers. The Opposition is treated as the joker, only good to be laughed at.
The issue of reservations for Marathas in government jobs and educational institutions brought to the fore the antics of the state's leaders. One sees a Bhujbal, a cabinet minister and a prominent OBC leader, openly speak against the CM who wants to do everything in his capacity to emerge as a leader of the Marathas.
CM Eknath Shinde is no babe in the woods. Sometime back, he had come out with a survey and an advertisement showing that he was more popular than Fadnavis. Everything was hurriedly buried before things got out of hand.
It is not an accident that whenever Shinde has made a push for the Marathas, Fadnavis has gone the extra mile to see that the OBCs are not hurt. Gopichand Padalkar and Ram Shinde, OBC leaders from the BJP, have always marked their presence at rallies organised by Bhujbal. An OBC convention that took place recently saw Fadnavis proudly proclaiming the BJP as an OBC party.
Shinde is going the extra mile to accommodate Manoj Jarange Patil, the activist from the Jalna district of the backward Marsathwada region, who has suddenly emerged as the voice of the agitating Marathas by pitching for OBC status to the Kunbis among them. That is why the CM allowed Patil and his horde of supporters to enter Mumbai last month.
Placating Patil, Sympathising With Bhujbal
The BJP, once a laggard in the state's politics, known as a party of shetji-bhatji (Banias and Brahmins), has come up by playing the politics of the OBCs. In the eighties, the late Vasantrao Bhagwat of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), who was a mentor to the late Pramod Mahajan and Gopinath Munde and a host of other leaders, changed the face of the BJP's state unit through his ‘MADHAV' pattern. ‘MA’ stood for Malis, 'DHA' for Dhangars, and 'V' for Vanjaras, all prominent backward castes.
The 1995 Sena-BJP government could be seen as the first OBC-dominated government in a state otherwise known for Maratha domination. Munde, a Vanjara, was the Dy CM.
By trying to placate Patil via Shinde on the one hand, and sympathising with Bhujbal's pro-OBC politics on the other, the BJP is seeking benefits from both sides. It wants to attract a section of the Marathas to weaken the Congress and the NCP further, while simultaneously retaining its OBC base.
And while BJP will never admit this, but it wants to benefit from the confrontation over the reservation issue like it happened in that story — the two cats and the monkey. The BJP wants the ‘cream’ of power, undiluted, unaltered.
Since the reservations project is not being carried out in controlled conditions, Operation Maharashtra could turn tricky if things. The result will be visible soon with the Lok Sabha polls scheduled in the next two months and the Assembly polls in October-November.
(Sunil Gatade is a former Associate Editor of the Press Trust of India. Venkatesh Kesari is an independent journalist. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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