Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis in the past week has shown complete immaturity for one holding such a high office, by his handling of the Maratha quota stir. When he announced recently that the government would soon fill up 72,000 state job vacancies pending for long, he opened up a Pandora's box.

Fadnavis should have stopped with that announcement and gone no further, waiting for people to mull it over and observed their initial reactions. But he went a step further and grandly stated that 16 % of these jobs would be reserved for Marathas. As a law graduate and chief minister who has been dealing with the Maratha reservation stir for nearly two years, he should have known that was an empty promise that would fool no one, least of all the Marathas.

Perhaps he wished to do a Prithviraj Chavan on the community—in the run up to the 2014 Maharashtra assembly elections, the Congress-NCP government had offered 16% reservation to Marathas in an act of political sophistry, knowing full well the decision would be struck down by the courts. It was. But they were weeks from the state elections and the Congress-NCP were simply buying some time—and votes. Constitutionally, there can be no more than 52% reservation and there was no room to accommodate another 16%.

By the time the Maratha groups caught on, the Congress-NCP were defeated and did not have to face the consequences of their chicanery. In the meantime, though, the BJP, for the same reasons—to buy the Maratha votes—promised them similar reservations in their manifesto. But when Maratha groups, particularly the Maratha Kranti Morcha which held 58 silent and peaceful morchas across Maharashtra between August 2015 and September 2017, held the ruling party to its promise, the Fadnavis government had to backtrack and set up a committee to study the demand and present its recommendations to the High Court.

Despite nudgings by the Supreme Court and several reminders by the Bombay High Court, the committee is yet to present its recommendations.