India, Sept. 20 -- Bihar's assembly elections often give a glimpse into larger national political trends. In the 1990s, the dominance of Lalu Prasad was representative of the larger assertion of Other Backward Classes, the ascendance of the politics of "social justice" which essentially meant an electoral coalition of religious minorities and marginalised castes, and the deeper democratisation of the polity. At the same time, his consecutive electoral victories also showed that in Indian politics, the question of political representation and electoral arithmetic was, in many ways, more crucial than the provision of public goods and service delivery....