Highways paralysed, Marathwada bandh called

Mumbai: Arterial transport corridors ground to a halt, commercial hubs shuttered their doors, and police battalions were deployed across central and western Maharashtra as the Maratha reservation agitation reached a boiling point on Wednesday. Entering the fifth day of his indefinite fast unto death at Antarwali Sarati village in Jalna district, activist Manoj Jarange Patil drastically hardened his stance, spurning all medical interventions, maintaining silence on a 15-point draft sent by the state government, and triggering a fierce wave of highway blockades alongside an assertive call for a comprehensive Marathwada Bandh.

From the early hours of Wednesday, thousands of demonstrators occupied key state and national highways, paralyzing vehicular movement along vital transit and supply corridors. Agitators staged spontaneous rasta rokos on the Pune-Bengaluru Highway, choked the Solapur-Dhule National Highway, and blocked major feeder stretches connecting to the Samruddhi Expressway. Across the agrarian heartland of Beed, Parbhani, Dharashiv, and Jalna, agitated youths set tyres ablaze on asphalt roads, obstructed state transport buses, and squatted at critical junctions while raising pro-quota slogans. To prevent potential arson and violence, the state-run Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation suspended operations across hundreds of rural routes, stranding thousands of everyday passengers and commercial carriers.

At the epicentre of the agitation in Jalna, Jarange’s deteriorating vitals triggered profound alarm within the state administration. Despite urgent entreaties from attending medical officers, the activist refused intravenous fluids, maintaining an uncompromising demand for an immediate government notification conferring Kunbi certificates upon all Marathas to grant them entry into the Other Backward Classes category.

Addressing the swelling crowds at his protest marquee on Wednesday afternoon, Jarange issued an unsparing warning to the government. “The government has tested our patience enough. We are not sitting here to beg for charity; we are demanding our constitutional right that was denied for generations,” Jarange told the gathering. “If a single drop of blood is spilt or if anything happens to my life, the government alone will bear the responsibility for the fury that follows across Maharashtra. We will not take a single step backward until the notification is in our hands.”