by dinesh narayanan lalua is a name uttered with much affection in bihar lalua or the chubby floppyhaired yadav leader lalu prasad yadav is the kind of guy bihari men love to hang out with accompanied by khaini tea and bucolic jokes the rjd leader can hold a stadium full of people in his thrall for hours with his oratory and wit for the same people jd us nitish kumar chief minister of bihar is a man to be admired from a distance the kind of person who likes clean sheets spanking floors and dense books reserved and wheels constantly cranking away in his engineers mind nitish is hardly the person for crowds according to his biography but nitish is also the consummate administrator driving bureaucrats to deliver on promises he made to the people shaped by the ideology of socialist ram manohar lohia and groomed as leaders from the bihar students agitation of the seventies this chalkandcheese pair has lorded over bihar during a tumultuous past and may yet grapple with its future contradictions if lalu helped bihars backward castes find their voice against upper caste tyranny nitish laid the foundation for the states economic progress first friends then colleagues of the erstwhile janata dal and later sworn enemies for two decades a period during which nitish even stopped taking lalus name the duo are now conjoined in an improbable alliance forged in the heat of ambition and the pressure of likely political irrelevance it is possible that together they would capture power it is unlikely that they will be able to stay together how can the alliance be steady when the leaders dont even talk to each other asked an rjd leader close to lalu he told et on condition of anonymity that though lalu has tried to talk to nitish the chief minister avoids him and his dislike is often evident but what can lalu do nitish calls the shots and lalu has to fall in line because his priority now is to politically settle his childrenshaky alliance the chill between the leaders has percolated through the alliance and has held up seatsharing talks while lalu is keen to get the seatsharing done with nitish is trying to delay after the two leaders agreed to fight the assembly elections together following a twohour meeting at samajwadi party supremo mulayam singh yadavs house in delhi in june it was decided that a sixmember committee would decide the candidates from each party and the congress another ally to fight the 243 assembly seats in bihar the jdu has 115 sitting mlas and the rjd 22 however in most constituencies that the jdu candidates won in 2010 the rjd came second and wants to contest from at least 100 seats the party claims that in a headtohead contest its candidates command more votes than jdus lalu believes that if they sit face to face they can easily sort out the differences but nitish doesnt want to do that