Jarange Ends His Fast With a Three-Month Clock

Manoj Jarange called off a 20-day hunger strike on September 17 after Maharashtra ministers met him at Patoda in Beed. The Maratha reservation activist gave the government three months to act on Kunbi gazette records, and said he would walk to Mumbai with women and children if that promise broke.

He had been moving from Antarwali Sarati in Jalna toward the capital, where police had already refused a protest nod during the Ganesh festival. Over one lakh supporters who had gone ahead were told to return home.

Jarange Stops the Fast, Keeps the Clock

The government team at Patoda included minister Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, minister Dada Bhuse, MLC Prasad Lad, MLA Suresh Dhas, and the Beed collector. They told him work on the Maratha quota file was already under way, and asked him to depute three people to watch it.

Lad said Jarange ended the fast after requests from Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, and Deputy Chief Minister Sunetra Pawar. The ministers, Lad said, committed to the promises made in that meeting.

Those promises, as the activist recited them, included government orders on the Satara, Kolhapur, Pune, and Aundh gazettes; a revised order on the Hyderabad Gazette; a pledge that the 58 lakh Kunbi records found by the Justice Sandeep Shinde panel would not be cut; and restoration of four Kunbi certificates taken back from elected women in Marathwada.

Jarange said Fadnavis and Shinde are not his enemies, then asked what choice he has when the file does not move. He wanted the chief minister’s signature, or a public video, on a line that not a single Kunbi record would be ignored.

If we are betrayed in the next three months, then we all will directly go to Mumbai along with our kids and women.

Manoj Jarange, Maratha reservation activist, at Patoda

He also said the agitation itself would continue. The fast was the part he was willing to pause.

Doctors had already advised hospital care as the march west continued and he stopped water and IV fluids. On September 16, Mumbai police had sought clarity on what he called contradictions in his plans for a city protest. By the next morning the ministers were in Beed, and the road to Azad Maidan was off, for now.

Last September’s Deal Came Due in Jalna

This was his 11th hunger strike, begun on August 29 at Antarwali Sarati, the same calendar week as last year’s Mumbai siege. He had called that earlier fast a final fight too.

On September 2, 2025, after five days at Azad Maidan, he sipped juice from Vikhe Patil and declared a win. The cabinet sub-committee had accepted six of eight demands. South Mumbai had been jammed by his supporters. A government order on the Hyderabad Gazette went out the same day.

The 2025 package covered Hyderabad and Satara gazette records so eligible Marathas could seek Kunbi certificates under the OBC list, withdrawal of protest cases from 2023 and 2024, help for families of people who died in earlier marches, village panels to check applications, and faster clearance by caste validity committees. The state refused a blanket Kunbi tag for every Maratha with no papers. Satara, Bombay, and Aundh, the ministers said then, would take a month.

A year later he was fasting again in Jalna, saying the papers still were not reaching people whose family link to an old Kunbi entry had already been shown. “I am talking about issuing certificates and not merely finding Kunbi records,” he said after ministers met him on August 24.

In May he had already put that complaint on his own account, writing that he had given the government 10 months and wanted action, not fresh assurances.

आंदोलनावर मी ठाम
सरकार ला १० महिने वेळ दिला होता
आश्वासने नको अंमलबजावणी हवी
तेही गरीबांच्या लेकांच्या भल्यासाठी
मराठा समाजावर अन्याय करू नका #मनोजजरांगे#manojjarange #maratha #marathareservation

— Manoj Jarange Official (P) (@manojjarange) May 29, 2026

THE QUOTA CALENDAR

1. September 2023: The state names a panel under retired Justice Sandeep Shinde to set a method for Maratha-Kunbi and Kunbi-Maratha certificates.
2. February 20, 2024: The legislature is moved a bill that names Marathas a Socially and Educationally Backward Class and sets a separate 10 percent quota.
3. September 2, 2025: Jarange ends the Azad Maidan fast after six of eight demands are accepted and a Hyderabad Gazette order is issued.
4. October 7, 2025: The Bombay High Court refuses an interim stay on that order, while OBC bodies keep their challenge alive.
5. August 29, 2026: He begins the 11th fast at Antarwali Sarati and again holds Mumbai as the next stop.
6. September 17, 2026: He ends the 20-day fast at Patoda and starts a three-month clock on the remaining gazettes.

The strike-and-pause cycle is now how this demand is handled. Ministers keep buying months because the other option is another freeze of south Mumbai, and the certificate office is where last year’s order stalled.

58 Lakh Records Meet a Narrow Gate

The political number in every speech is 58 lakh. That is how many historical entries the Shinde panel and the revenue machinery say they have examined, tagged Kunbi, Maratha-Kunbi, or Kunbi-Maratha.

The administrative number is smaller, and it is the one the government handed Jarange. Up to August 24, it had 1,431,634 applications. It had issued 1,424,634 Kunbi certificates. It listed 1,747 applications as pending and 5,248 as rejected.

THE CERTIFICATE DESK

Vikhe Patil has said only 0.3 percent of entries were rejected, a rounded rate next to those 5,248 refusals, and has told people with papers to file with collectors. Officials also say new applications are not arriving at anything like 58 lakh. The state’s line is that 58 lakh is a pile of old records, not 58 lakh people waiting for a card.

Jarange’s line is the opposite. If a record exists, a descendant who can show the family link should walk out with a certificate and a validity paper, without a second maze. He has accused local offices of asking for extra documents after that link is already shown, and of taking certificates back after they were given.

Four of those take-backs became a political file of their own. The Kunbi certificates of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar zilla parishad member Jyoti Shinde, Gangapur councillor Varsha Gaikwad, Parbhani zilla parishad member Komal Parve, and Majalgaon councillor Rekha Sarode were cancelled, the stated reason being a failure to prove paternal Kunbi blood relatives. He wants those four restored as part of the Patoda terms.

Genealogy work sits with taluka committees headed by tehsildars. Their term now runs to June 30, 2027, after an earlier end date of June 30, 2026. District sites already publish Kunbi records held in tahsil offices as the raw material for those family trees. Jarange wants the state’s caste certificate verification system itself removed, arguing other states let tehsildars and sub-divisional officers finish the job.

That is the narrow gate. Last year’s order created a path. It did not, on his reading, create a right that an old Nizam or princely entry can be cashed without another official’s doubt.

Why the Satara Gazette Still Needs Three Months

The Hyderabad Gazette, issued by the Nizam’s government in 1918, is the document that first opened this route for Marathwada. It recorded agrarian Marathas in that region as Kunbi, the peasant caste already on Maharashtra’s OBC list. The September 2, 2025 order told village panels to use those references, plus old land and family papers, before printing a certificate.

Western Maharashtra was supposed to follow. The Satara Gazette of 1884 lists Marathas as Kunbi-Marathas. A census count from that district, leaving out Phaltan, Sangli, and Miraj as they then stood, put 5,83,569 people down as Kunbi. The Aundh and Bombay gazettes cover other western tracts. A Kolhapur Gazette from 1886 is now being cited the same way, as a Shahu-era record that Maratha and Kunbi were written as one.

Vikhe Patil told the Patoda meeting that Satara is a 1,100-page report and will take three to four months of study, plus a written comment from the advocate general, before Kolhapur and Satara can be acted on. He also said the Hyderabad order is in court and that the state would try to keep a stay off it.

Minister Shambhuraj Desai had already, on September 14, put the legal fear in public. He said 12 of Jarange’s 14 demands on the 2026 list were done, and that the two still open were certificates against the 58 lakh records and the Satara and Aundh gazetteers. A rushed order, he said, could be stayed, and then the whole desk would stop. Collectors had been told to run special camps. The gazette work, he said, was continuing.

Jarange is no longer willing to treat “continuing” as the answer. He asked for a government order that says Maratha and Kunbi are the same, in the same form as a recent order treating Hindu Wani, Hindu Vaishya, and Vaishya Wani as one community. He wants that paper to say Marathas were Kunbi before Independence and were left out of the OBC list by a clerical miss.

That is a wider claim than a family-tree check. It is also the claim the 2025 bargain refused when it turned down a blanket tag with no documents. The three-month clock is how both sides have chosen to park that fight through the rest of the festival season.

Sangli, Satara and the OBC Backlash

Every Kunbi certificate issued to a Maratha applicant is a claim on the same OBC seats that Mali, Dhangar, Vanjari, and older Kunbi families already use. That is why the Hyderabad order was challenged within weeks, and why the high court was told a stay was needed to stop what petitioners called an irreversible shift.

The court did not stay the order on October 7, 2025. Kunbi Sena and other OBC organisations still have their petitions on the file. The state’s defence has been that a Maratha who proves a Kunbi line is not a new quota. It is an old entry being honoured.

On the ground the fight is about chairs, not gazettes. In Sangli, OBC campaigner Laxman Hakke said on September 16 that Kunbi certificates had already been used to take posts that OBC groups treat as theirs.

LOCAL POSTS HAKKE FLAGGED

• Kolhapur: The mayor’s chair, he said, had gone to a Maratha candidate on a Kunbi certificate.
• Satara: The zilla parishad president’s post, he said, had moved the same way.
• Sangli: The sabhapati’s post, he said, had been taken through the same route.

Hakke called the Hyderabad Gazette a plan to finish OBC reservation by paperwork. Whether those three wins stand up in a scrutiny committee is a separate question. The political fact is that OBC outfits now treat Jarange’s certificate drive as a raid on a closed list, not a correction of a colonial ledger.

Shinde has kept to the other sentence. On September 15 he said the government would back a lawful Maratha claim and would not do injustice to OBCs. Fadnavis, when the fast began, said the state would talk about demands that were constitutionally valid and legally viable, and would not accept a demand that broke Supreme Court orders. He also said the government would not tolerate intimidating tactics, and he questioned why the march was being timed on the Ganesh calendar.

That is the bind the three-month paper does not dissolve. A certificate that is generous enough to satisfy Jalna will be read in Sangli as a theft. A certificate that is strict enough to survive court will be read in Jalna as betrayal.

Resetting the 10 Percent Case in Bombay

The Kunbi route exists because the separate Maratha quota keeps dying in court. A constitution bench of the Supreme Court on May 5, 2021, in Dr. Jaishri Laxmanrao Patil v. Chief Minister of Maharashtra, struck down the 2018 law that had given Marathas a 16 percent SEBC quota. The judges held that the Gaikwad Commission had not shown an extraordinary case for crossing the 50 percent cap set in Indra Sawhney in 1992, and that Marathas had not been shown to be a backward class in the sense the Constitution requires.

The 2024 reply was a new statute. The Maharashtra State Reservation for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Act names the Maratha community as an SEBC for the state and sets 10 percent of seats and jobs aside for that class, with a creamy-layer test. The bill says the new quota does not cut the older OBC reservation. Marathas are about one-third of the state’s people, which is why every percentage point is a crowd.

A three-judge bench led by Justice Ravindra Ghuge heard the challenge to that 2024 Act across 21 sittings after July 18, 2025. Advocate General Milind Sathe was still closing the state’s case when the Supreme Court Collegium moved Ghuge to the Calcutta High Court. He left the Bombay High Court on September 8, 2026. The Maratha quota file, almost at judgment, goes to a new bench and starts over. It is the second reset of that case since 2024.

Jarange has never treated the 10 percent law as enough, because he expects it to fall the way 16 percent fell. The Kunbi certificate is his workaround. It does not add a new quota. It tries to walk Marathas through a door the OBC list already holds. That is also why OBC groups fight it, and why the Hyderabad order and the SEBC Act now sit on parallel tracks in the same high court. A related fight over the 50 percent ceiling on local quotas is still live in the Supreme Court, which is the same arithmetic the gazette strategy is built to dodge.

If Betrayed, He Will Walk to Mumbai

The march that did not happen was already on the calendar. Jarange had left Antarwali Sarati for Mumbai, with stops through Ahilyanagar, Pune, and Khopoli in Raigad, and a planned arrival on September 19. Last year’s Azad Maidan crowd is the reason that date still matters. It is also why police cited the Ganesh festival and refused permission, and why Fadnavis treated the timing as a threat.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The fast: The 20-day hunger strike that began on August 29 is over, after the Patoda meeting on September 17.
• The clock: Jarange has given three months for gazette orders and a written pledge that the 58 lakh records will not be cut.
• The crowd: He has told more than one lakh supporters already in Mumbai to go home.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The signature: He asked Fadnavis to sign, or to say on camera, that no Kunbi record will be ignored. No such signed paper has been shown.
• The stay risk: Vikhe Patil said the Hyderabad order is in court and that the state would try to keep a stay off any new gazette order. That outcome is not in hand.

September 17 is also Marathwada Liberation Day, the date Nizam rule ended in the region whose 1918 gazette is the core of this fight. Jarange greeted the day from Patoda and said he would not walk away from the gazette. The ministers left with a pause. He left with a date. If that date passes without the paper he wants, he has already said who he will bring with him to Mumbai.