But since Solanki took over as the state Congress boss in 2005, he has emerged as a thinking politician, who had the guile to pit a Patel projectile against Chief Minister Narendra Modi in his Maninagar in the forthcoming assembly election.
Indeed, much of what a low-profile Bharatsinh Solanki has been doing for the past two years is no secret. Like Modi, Solanki is tech-savvy: He has three laptops, carries a Toshiba while on the move, and also the latest Nokia communicator, that he uses to flash daily news reports to senior colleagues each morning.
And at 54, Solanki is quite a contrast to his predecessor Shankarsinh Vaghela, in his early 60s, who in an old-fashioned way continues to say that the brain is more important than computers.
However, if Vaghela is considered a threat to Modi, then so is Solanki, with the party finding in him a leader with mass base, a determined fighter, and, more importantly, representative of numerically decisive OBC community.
