It started as the protest of the Kopardi rape and murder and has now turned into a political quagmire, where no party knows what to do with the Maratha silent marches in Maharashtra.
Marathas have been the dominant social caste in Maharashtra for centuries. It's a strange caste/community that is not defined by what its members do for living. Primarily an agrarian community that also wielded swords in the Mughal era — both for and against, is how the Marathas have been shaped. As a result, the community also held social and political power; not just after the Independence, but also through the medieval era where a Deshmukh's gadhi (small fortress), or a Patil's wada (mostly the biggest house in a village) used to be the power centres in this part of India.
They also held huge tracts of land, won, gifted and inherited and therefore the community was also among the wealthiest. Thus the Marathas in Maharashtra enjoyed both economic and social power for centuries. It continued smoothly as the Congress and then the Nationalist Congress Party were both led and guided by Maratha leaders. Even today, the community has 144 MLAs in the state--half the total strength.
And yet, the Maratha youth today feels he has been robbed off opportunities in the new era where Dalits and OBCs are getting ahead, thanks to reservations in jobs and education. They are blind to the fact that the issues that they are facing are those faced by the agrarian community at large, and as they turned away their face from education, focusing on agriculture and rural politics, they started lagging behind. The Kopardi incident and subsequent protest came at the time when the Marathas felt they had lost the power--Chief Minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadanvis is a brahmin.
And then, it suddenly turned into a tsunami of sorts — where floods of silent marches across towns in Maharashtra have become the talking point, quietly disrupting normal life to make a petulant point. True, the Maratha seems united today. It is also true that the morchas are silent today. However, they have also led to apprehension among others, mainly the Dalits and the OBCs. Supporters of this Maratha unity insist they are not against any particular caste and yet we have seen violent reactions in Pune and Nashik. Maharashtra today is a tinderbox and it is scary that this mob has no leader. All party leaders are participating in them, because they cannot ignore the vote bank. What they cannot see, though, is that a leaderless mob will not take time to turn into an irresponsible one.
