Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar were already drifting apart by the time spring arrived in 1994. The two university politics comrades were still in the same party — the famously unwieldy Janata Dal — but had stopped talking or meeting each other.

“It is not possible to speak to you any longer because you are not, to my mind, earnest about discussing serious or important issues,” a frustrated Kumar wrote to the then chief minister (CM) in 1992. At the zenith of his power, Prasad brushed aside the critique of a man he considered too timid for the rough and tumble of electoral politics. “You’ll teach me politics?” he asked brusquely, according to journalist Sankarshan Thakur’s biography of Kumar, A Single Man.

Spurned, Kumar curdled for months. Around him, the air was electric. The Supreme Court had just endorsed the government’s decision to introduce reservations for other backward classes. The gambit — driven more by electoral compulsions than social justice considerations — unleashed a firestorm of protest from upper-caste communities. Across the heartland, a new wind was blowing — large chunks of the dominant backward castes were breaking away from national parties even as Hindutva was gaining in strength.

Bihar was an early site for this churn. Prasad had stormed to power in 1990. But smaller backward groups were anxious — would the dominant Yadavs corner a lion’s share of reservations? Would the spoils of the “garibon ki sarkar” (government of the poor) flow only to Prasad’s (Yadav) acolytes? Could the 100-odd small castes, collectively called extremely backward classes (EBC), gain a toehold?

That dewy February morning at the Kurmi Chetna Rally, Gandhi Maidan was rife with speculation about whether the most influential Kurmi in the state — Nitish Kumar — would show up. But the engineer prevaricated. Prasad had a stranglehold on the Janata Dal in Bihar, and his coalition of backwards-Dalits-Muslims seemed invincible. Kumar had none of the crackling chemistry........

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