In the ongoing Gurjjar protests in Rajasthan-surfacing a year after a similar agitation for Scheduled Tribe status-there seems to be a distinct refrain: don’t mention the rival Meena community.

“We are not competing with anyone. Our agitation has nothing to do with anyone, not even the Meenas. We are fighting our battle with the state government,” insists Gurjjar leader Kirori Singh Bainsala, who is spearheading the agitation in Bayana.

After last year’s bitter experience when the Meenas—a community that enjoys ST status but does not want Gurjjars to get it—clashed with the Gurjjars, Bainsala and his men seem to be treading cautiously. While Sikandara and Bayana reel under heavy protests that spread to other parts of the state by Tuesday, the protests began, in a strange coincidence, in places where there aren’t too many Meena-dominated villages. Across Bayana, where thousands of Gurjjars continue to block trains, Meena villages are few and far between. Sikandara, where the police firing claimed more than a dozen lives and where Gurjjars are still sitting on the national highway with six corpses, is at least 35 kilometres away from the Meena-dominated belt of Mahwa.

Interestingly, Badabujurg village, on the Khedla road in Mahwa, is home to BJP leader K.L. Meena. Here, the Meena community is fuming. “If you think Meenas will stand and watch Gurjjars being given sops by the government, you are mistaken. There is no denying the fact that once they try encroaching our ST category space, we’ll open a war,” said Prabal Meena, a Badabujurg resident.

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