Maratha reservation bill passed but tough legal battle lies ahead

Maratha quota: This is the third attempt by state government to give reservation quota to Marathas, a politically and socially dominant community in the state.

Mumbai: For the Eknath Shinde government, the passing of the bill to give reservation to the Maratha community is just the first step. Its real test will be in court, given that two previous bills on the subject have failed legal scrutiny in the past ten years. Legal experts as well as opposition parties have expressed doubts about whether the new bill will be legally tenable.

Maratha quota activist Manoj Jarange Patil with Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde in Navi Mumbai on Saturday. (Bachchan Kumar/HT Photo) (HT Photo/Bachchan Kumar)

Constitutional expert and former Maharashtra advocate-general Shrihari Aney opined that the bill would face certain challenges. “For one, the government has exceeded the Supreme Court-ordained reservation limit by 10 percent,” he said. “Also, it has created a new category. There are only two defined classes for reservation—scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The third class, which is socially, culturally and educationally backward, is the OBCs. It would have been appropriate to put the Maratha caste in that category. Instead a new category was created, which is not permissible without amending the Constitution.” Aney added that the government’s move also violated the rights of citizens in the open category.

Constitutional expert Ulhas Bapat echoed Aney’s sentiments, saying it was difficult for the bill to pass legal scrutiny, as the courts had time and again clarified that reservation should not cross the 50 percent cap. “If the Maratha community is educationally and socially backward, it should have been included in the OBC category,” he said.

This is the third attempt by the state government to give a reservation quota to Marathas, a politically and socially dominant community in the state. The community once mostly relied on agriculture, but as income from agriculture dwindled, it felt it deserved a reservation quota since Maratha youths were lagging behind other communities in education and job opportunities.

In 2014, the then Congress-NCP government gave a 16 percent quota to Marathas, which was struck down by the Bombay high court. In 2018, the Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP-Shiv Sena government again enacted legislation providing a similar quota, which was also challenged in the high court. The HC reduced the quota to 12 and 13 percent in jobs and education respectively but the bill was quashed by the Supreme Court in May 2021 for violating the 50 percent cap and for the failure of the M B Gaikwad Commission Report to prove the “backwardness” of Marathas. The SC also rejected a review petition moved by the state government. The curative petition filed by the government is still pending.

A state government official said that this time’s commission, headed by Justice Sunil Shukre, had ensured that the Maratha survey was extensive. “It covered 25 million households,” he said. “The report has details of the employment scenario in the community and how agricultural distress has affected it badly.”

CM Shinde, in his speech in the assembly, claimed that the 2021 judgement of the apex court had given power to the state government to review and ascertain the backwardness of a community. But while he and his colleagues insisted that they had taken care to avoid a repetition of the previous two instances in court, opposition leaders questioned the legal tenability of the bill. “It’s nothing but a farce,” Vijay Wadettiwar, leader of the opposition in the assembly, told the media. “The government has presented it with an eye on the Lok Sabha elections. It will not survive in the Supreme Court.”

Deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said that the Supreme Court had “pointed out some errors” in the bill that his government introduced in 2018. “Our government thus appointed a committee of legal experts and has rectified all the errors to present a new bill,” he said. “Around 3.5 lakh government employees conducted an extensive survey of 2.5 crore families and the report was submitted by the State Backward Classes Commission.”