Harsha Kumari Singh: Gujjar leader Col Bainsla is the man who shook the Vasundhara government in Rajasthan, leading two violent agitations for reservation in May-June 2007 and 2008.
Bainsla brought the state to standstill, as he and his supporters occupied railway tracks and jammed roads, demanding Scheduled Tribe (ST) status for the Gujjars. In the violence that followed, 70 people died.
But politics makes strange bedfellows is an old cliché. Bainsla is now fighting the election from Sawai Madhopur Tonk in Rajasthan on a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ticket.
"It's a u turn you might say, but I felt the need for a political voice," said Bainsla.
Has Bainsla realised that jamming roads and railway tracks will not get him reservations, or has he sold out to the BJP?
Roop Singh was killed in police firing in May 2008. His family say he was shot when he went out to pick up a friend who had been injured in a scuffle with the police. His two children are now orphans, in the care of his old widowed mother.
"Bainsla has done a deal with the BJP to fill his stomach. If anyway one's children die, how does he care," said Roop Singh's wife.
But behind the move to field Bainsla from Sawai Madhopur is clever arithmetic. Bainsla will take on Meena strongman, Namo Narayan Meena. The tribal Meena community has always resisted the Gujjar demand to share the reservation pie, and in Sawai Madhopur Tonk, this fight for reservations could decide the election.