India, Nov. 15 -- 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 ...