Mumbai: The Devendra Fadnavis government in Maharashtra will bring in a bill on Thursday to provide quota to the restive Maratha community as a ‘socially and educationally backward class’. Since all political parties, including the Opposition Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), have supported quota for the Marathas, the bill is likely to be passed unanimously in both houses of the state legislature.
A senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister told Mint that the government would also table in the state legislature an ‘action taken report’ based on the report of the Maharashtra State Commission for the backward classes submitted to the government on November 15.
The Maharashtra legislature is in its Winter session and the Fadnavis government is working to the deadline of November 30 to provide 16% reservation in education and government jobs to the Marathas. The Winter session ends on Friday.
On November 15 when the Commission submitted its report to the government establishing that the Marathas, who account for 32-35% of the state’s population, were a socially and educationally backward community, Fadnavis had said that the government would complete the legal procedures to provide quota by December 1. The chief minister later said that Maharashtra would follow Tamil Nadu’s model to raise the quota percentage to 68% from the current 52%.
“We will bring in a bill tomorrow which will seek to provide reservation to the Maratha community on the basis of the Commission’s report. The government is committed to provide quota by the end of November and we want to make it legally fool-proof unlike legislative measures carried out in the past, which did not stand the legal test,” the BJP minister said requesting anonymity. This minister is a member of a ministerial sub-committee set up by Fadnavis to study the Commission’s report and thrash out a legally sustainable solution to the impasse.
The ministerial sub-committee has held prolonged consultations with the state’s law and judiciary department as well as the state’s advocate general, Aashutosh Kumbhakoni, and Constitutional experts, the minister said.
He recalled that an Ordinance issued by the then Congress-Nationalist Congress Party government in September 2014 and an Act passed by the Fadnavis government in December 2014 had failed the legal scrutiny of the Bombay High Court.
“We cannot rule out legal challenges to this legislation, but unlike the Ordinance and the previous Act, this Act will stand on a more solid footing, Besides, it also has the backing of the Commission’s report, which was not the case earlier,” according to the minister.
The Opposition Congress-NCP have criticised the government for not tabling the Commission’s report in the House, claiming that by not presenting the full report to the House, the government was jeopardising the legal sustainability of the Act it planned to bring in.
Senior Congress leader and former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan said in the legislative assembly that the Article 15 of the Maharashtra State Commission for Backward Classes Act made it mandatory on the government to present every report and recommendations of the Commission in each House of the legislature along with the government’s action on the report.
Chavan also pointed out that the Bombay High Court, while striking down the Ordinance issued by the Congress-NCP government in November 2014, had noted that “it cannot help notice that the state government never placed Justice Bapat Commission Report (an earlier commission set up to study the social and economic status of the Maratha community) on the floor of the State Legislative Assembly in spite of the mandate of section 15 of the Maharashtra Backward Class Commission Act 2005, nor did the state government place the Rane Committee Report before the State Legislative Assembly and, therefore the fact that State Government did not allow the State Legislative Assembly to consider the issue of reservations”.
“If you want to give a legally fool-proof quota to the Maratha community, you must present the full report of the Commission before the House,” Chavan said.
Countering the opposition, Fadnavis said various backward class commissions in Maharashtra had submitted 51 reports pertaining to different castes and communities and that the report on the Marathas was 52nd. “None of those 51 reports was ever submitted to the legislature and it is not mandatory to do so. The government is doing everything it can to provide legally sustainable quota to the Marathas and we are committed to do so by the end of this session. However, the opposition is bent on creating misgivings for political ends and we will fight this politically,” according to Fadnavis.
He also said that the Marathas would be given 16% quota without disturbing the existing reservations to the SCs, STs, OBCs, and others.