Bainsla shot into prominence last year when he led his community's demand for inclusion in the list of Scheduled Tribes. The inclusion of Rajasthan's dominant Jat community in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category, shrinking the Gujjar's share of the OBC pie was the apparent trigger for the agitation. He led a siege over Jaipur and Delhi, which only let up when Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje decided to set up a commission to look into their demands.
At that time, a divide grew in the agitation: while Bainsla was party to the agreement with the government, a sizeable section of the movement listened to younger leaders like Roop Singh who accused Bainsla of selling out.
A year after the agreement, a decision was made by the Gujjar Aarakshan Sanghursh Samiti to raise the matter once again, on the first anniversary of the original agitation. This time also, the 68-year-old former colonel in the Indian Army is the face, but not the undisputed leader, of the agitation.
Bainsla, whose two sons, Daulat and Jai, followed him into the army, and whose daughter is in the income tax department, is a leader whose every action is under scrutiny by his own people. His demand that the state government negotiators travel to the epicentre of the movement at Bayana and Pilupura near Alwar reflects the distrust with which the negotiation process was viewed by the community last time.
Bainsla too is more aware of the fact that it has become a fight to the finish for his community. The stubborn insistence of the community to not cremate its 40 dead members till its demands are at least partially met reflects the hardening stance of the movement, and Bainsla has had to go along with it.
"The problem is not just reservations or the Jats getting OBC status," said a top government negotiator. "Several developments in the last few months have made the Gujjar's desperate for relevance. For example, the delimitation process has destroyed the one seat that was an out-and-out Gujjar seat
