Opposition parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena, are up in arms against a state government-appointed committee recommending quotas for Muslims.
The opposition has alleged that the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party alliance was indulging in vote bank politics in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha and state assembly elections.
The report of the seven-member committee under retired IAS officer and former Aligarh Muslim University vice-chancellor Dr Mehmood-ur-Rehman, which was set up to study the condition of the Muslim community in the social, economic and education sectors and make recommendations to the government to ensure that Muslims were integrated within the mainstream, was submitted to chief minister Prithviraj Chavan on Monday.
The committee has recommended reservations for Muslims in government and private sector jobs and in housing projects.
Shiv Sena group leader in the state legislative council Diwakar Raote said, “This is an admission that the Congress took the votes of Muslims for over 60 years but did not improve their condition.
The Congress has betrayed Muslims.”
“The Congress has kept them out of the mainstream for vote bank politics,” he alleged.
Raote added that reservations on religious ground went against the grain of a secular constitution and pointed to how the late Sena chief, Bal Thackeray, had sought reservations on the basis of economic criteria rather than a system based on caste.
On the other hand, the state government had soft-pedaled on quotas for the Maratha community, which makes up around 30% of Maharashtra’s population, Raote said.
BJP spokesperson Madhav Bhandari called the state-appointed committee’s recommendation “an election gimmick”.
Sena lashes out
Shiv Sena group leader in the state legislative council Diwakar Raote (in pic) said that reservations on religious ground went against the grain of a secular constitution and pointed to how the late Sena chief, Bal Thackeray, had sought reservations on the basis of economic criteria rather than a system based on caste
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