Mumbai police block Jarange's 19 September hunger strike at Azad Maidan

Azad Maidan police refused Manoj Jarange Patil permission to begin an indefinite hunger strike in the ground from 19 September. Senior inspector Raja Bidkar signed a six-page letter on Sunday. The reasons listed were Ganeshotsav deployment, the state's 2025 rules on public meetings, a Supreme Court order in the Amit Sahni case, Bombay High Court directions, and the crowd that spilled around Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus and the BMC headquarters during last year's stir.

Ganeshotsav runs from 14 to 25 September. Police wrote that the city becomes a target for anti-social elements when devotees fill the island and that a second mass sit-in cannot be staffed at the same time. The 2025 rules limit an agitation permission to one day at a time and cap duration and location. Jarange's application asked for an open-ended fast and put the expected crowd at 4,000 to 4,500. Bidkar wrote that Azad Maidan cannot hold that number under the cap.

Jarange is already fasting in Jalna district. Sunday was described in local reports as the 16th day of the present strike. He said the Mumbai column will still leave Antarwali-Sarati on 15 September and that the fast at Azad Maidan will be peaceful. He called the refusal dictatorship and said it went against Bombay High Court orders. He also said the Maharashtra government was conspiring to kill him and to crush the Maratha reservation agitation.

The demand set has not moved. Jarange wants Kunbi caste certificates issued against a historical record list that his organisation puts near 58 lakh names, and he wants verification committees dropped. He has called earlier fasts the last one until those papers are in hand. In early September he took water and an intravenous drip after five days without food and kept the strike on the books. The 19 September date was the plan to bring that fast into the capital of the state.

Police treated last year as the template they will not repeat. The 2025 sit-in ran past the numbers written on the permission. Traffic around CSMT and the civic headquarters stopped. The new letter uses that overflow as evidence that assurances do not bind the crowd. It also uses the festival calendar as a hard stop. A hunger strike that begins on 19 September would sit inside the visarjan week, when immersion processions already take the same roads the police would need for a second perimeter.

The legal stack in the letter is thick on purpose. Amit Sahni is the Supreme Court case that tightened rules on prolonged protests in public grounds. The 2025 Maharashtra rules add a one-day clock. Section 46 of those rules is cited by number. Together they give the station house a way to say no without arguing the merits of Maratha reservation. Jarange's reply ignores that stack and returns to motive: the government, he says, wants the agitation to end before the certificates are printed.

What happens on 15 September is now the test. If the column leaves Antarwali-Sarati without a new venue, it will meet a closed maidan and a festival deployment. If Jarange stays in Jalna, the Mumbai date becomes a letter in a file. Either way the reservation file does not move on the strength of a police permission. It moves if the state prints Kunbi papers or if the courts force a different ground. Sunday's letter only decided that Azad Maidan, in the middle of Ganeshotsav, is not that ground.