(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated May 31, 1997)

Modesty is a term not usually associated with Lalu Prasad Yadav. Imperious, unctuous and ruthlessly outspoken, Lalu's astonishing arrogance stems from the conviction that he is the true messiah of Bihar's poor and downtrodden.

Once compared to Lord Krishna and flattered by an intellectual into believing that he possessed "Napoleonic wile and Bismarckian guile", Lalu combined the roles of God, folk hero and village bully and used it to devastating advantage. In a state bereft of wealth, opportunity and even hope, Lalu became Bihar's sole point of certitude.

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It was a loftiness that was too good to last. Even before Joginder Singh's dramatic Sunday announcement of his prosecution in the Rs 900 crore fodder scam put an enormous question mark over his future as chief minister, life was getting uneasy for Lalu.

He could pretend that the dramatic surge of the BJP-Samata Party alliance in the 1996 Lok Sabha election was an aberration (the Janata Dal lost 10 Lok Sabha seats, and its lead in assembly segments fell from 163 in 1995 to 132); he could wish away the party's defeat in four of the 10 assembly seats previously held by it in the subsequent by-elections, and he could delude himself that the crowds in his March 18 "railla" was the last word in popular endorsement. But his inflated sense of self could never reconcile to the fact that Bihar was beginning to tire of Lalu.

Ironically, it is not the "CBI conspiracy" that has proved his undoing. Bihar's most famous chief minister has been unmade by precisely the same commodity that made him apparently invincible: politics. The charge-sheet in the fodder scam was the proverbial final nail in the coffin.

Lalu should have gauged the writing on the wall.