A day after Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis reiterated his government’s commitment to granting quota for the Maratha community, two more personscommitted suicide allegedly over the issue on Friday.
Umesh Atmaram Indait, 22, a resident Aurangabad’s Chikalthana area, allegedly hanged himself in his house in the city’s Choudhary Colony.
In the second case, Dattatrey Tukaram Shinde, 34, a resident of Purandar in Pune district, reportedly threw himself in front of a train at the Daundaj railway station.
Both had allegedly written suicide notes blaming the government’s ‘delay’ in granting reservation to the Maratha community.
With these, the number of suicides attributed by the police , where the police have attributed the cause to be the reservation issue, has risen to six.
Unemployment cited
A suicide note allegedly written by Indait cites unemployment as the cause behind his taking the extreme step. “I could not fulfil the dreams of my parents. I am jobless even after completing my B.Sc.,” read the note.
Meanwhile, speaking in Pune, prominent Maratha leader and Nationalist Congress Party MP from Satara, Udayanraje Bhosale lambasted the State government for dragging its feet over reservation to the Maratha community.
“The government immediately ought to give reservation not only for the Marathas, but for the Muslim and Dhangar communities as well. Why have kept these issues on the back-burner for so long? It seems to have no willpower to resolve these pressing matters,” said the MP, who is a direct descendant of the Maratha warrior king Shivaji.
Mr. Bhosale further exhorted the government to show the same alacrity in granting a quota for the Marathas as the Centre had done while pushing through the SC/ST Atrocities Act.
‘Withdraw cases’
“We are not demanding that the State scrap reservation for other deprived communities to accommodate us…but can the agitators [for the Maratha quota] be held responsible if their righteous anger boils over,” he said, demanding that cases against agitators be withdrawn lest there be more unrest in the State.
Remarking that he was deeply grieved over the spate of suicides, Mr. Bhosale further said he would soon be holding a ‘Maratha Arakshan (Reservation) Parishad’ in which every district coordinator of the ‘Maratha Kranti Morcha’ would participate to decide on the future course of action to be taken by the agitators.
Earlier this week, another youth Abhijit Deshmukh, 30, allegedly hanged himself from a tree outside his home in Beed’s Kaij tehsil.
Days before, Pramod Hore-Patil (in his early 30s), took his life by jumping in front of a train in Aurangabad’s Mukundwadi area on the night of July 29. Patil claimed he was sacrificing his life for the ongoing Maratha quota agitation in a Facebook post he uploaded before his suicide.
The trigger for suicide attempts for the cause of Maratha reservation began after 28-year-old Maratha reservation activist Kakasaheb Shinde plunged into the River Godavari in Aurangabad’s Gangapur tehsil on July 23, thereby intensifying the agitation.
Meanwhile, in Ahmednagar’s Nevasa tehsil, a mixed group of agitators from the Maratha, Muslim and Dhangar communities staged a march demanding reservation while Morcha agitators blocked the Mumbai-Goa highway in Sindhudurg in the Konkan for several hours.
