Manoj Jarange ends 20-day fast and gives Maharashtra three months

Manoj Jarange called off a 20-day hunger strike on 17 September and gave the Maharashtra government three months to act on Maratha reservation demands. He spoke at Patoda in Beed district after a state delegation met him on the road to Mumbai.

Jarange, 44, began the fast on 29 August at Antarwali Sarati in Jalna. His core demand is that eligible Marathas receive Kunbi caste certificates so they can claim seats and jobs under the Other Backward Classes quota. He wants the state to recognise historical records in writing, including entries in the Hyderabad, Satara and Aundh gazettes, and he wants Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to sign that paper.

“The government should give in writing that not a single Kunbi record will be ignored,” he said. If the government “betrays” the assurance in three months, “we all will directly go to Mumbai along with our kids and women.” He asked more than one lakh supporters already in or heading toward the city to go home for now.

The march that stopped in Beed

Jarange left his village on 15 September aiming to reach Mumbai on 19 September through Ahilyanagar, Pune and Khopoli. Mumbai Police had already refused permission for a protest at Azad Maidan. A 15 September police notice asked him to explain what the police called contradictions in his plans. He had written that he would come with about 50 people. A much larger column formed behind him.

The column halted in Patoda. Beed district civil surgeon Dr Satishkumar Solanke examined him on 16 September and said blood pressure and blood sugar had fallen sharply. Solanke described acute dehydration and said Jarange was barely responsive. Doctors wanted him in an ICU and were waiting on urine tests. Jarange said he felt a burning pain in his stomach and feet and that he had stopped intravenous fluids on 12 September.

He told the Patoda gathering he could barely move his limbs. He also said the movement had already changed the file. He claimed 58 lakh archival records, known as nondi, had been located and that those papers could open reservation benefits for nearly 2.5 crore Marathas. The immediate ask, he said, is a gazette that treats those records as official.

Why the certificates matter

Maharashtra has tried more than one route to a Maratha quota. Courts have struck down standalone Maratha reservation that pushed the state over the 50 percent ceiling. Jarange’s method is different. He does not ask for a new caste category. He asks the state to treat a large share of Marathas as Kunbi, a community already inside the OBC list, wherever old revenue and gazette papers show that lineage.

That path avoids a fresh statute that would have to survive the Supreme Court. It also collides with OBC groups that say a mass conversion of Marathas into Kunbi certificate holders will shrink their own share of the same pool. The three-month clock is therefore a test of whether Fadnavis can write a narrow administrative order without setting off a second agitation from the other side of the OBC list.

Fadnavis had said the government would not accept intimidation and had questioned the timing of the march during Ganesh festival. The delegation that met Jarange in Patoda told him the state had already started work on the records. He accepted a pause, not a settlement. Last year his fast at Azad Maidan filled South Mumbai streets. The threat to repeat that scene in December is the leverage he kept when he ate again.

What the next 90 days have to produce

Three documents will decide whether the pause holds. A written assurance that no Kunbi record will be ignored. A gazette or circular that tells tehsildars how to read the Hyderabad, Satara and Aundh papers. And a flow of actual certificates that is large enough for Jarange to show his supporters that the paper is not another committee.

If those do not appear, he has already named the venue. Mumbai, with families, on a date he can pick after mid-December. The police refusal at Azad Maidan will then become the first argument of the next round rather than the last argument of this one.

For the moment the strike is over, the column is turning back, and the reservation file is again on a calendar rather than on a roadside cot in Beed.