It is during this mandal-kamandal turmoil (kamandal being the utensil carried by Hindu holy men) that politicians like Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar in Bihar and Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh - all belonging to the backward castes - came to represent influential forces to reckon with.

However, the bane of their sectarian politics with its constant need for pandering to particular castes meant that their leaders had little time for development projects relating to health, education, water supply, power and roads.

Instead, their whole attention was on manipulating casteist and communal elements in order to retain and strengthen their hold on power. As is usual in politics, they also had to cope with internal tussles, as when Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar - one a Yadav and the other a Kurmi - fell out and joined rival political formations.

But it is not enough only to blame the preoccupation with caste-based politics for the failures on the development front. What is perhaps even more important is to understand the myopia of the politicians whose sole political capital was their association with particular castes.

For Lalu Prasad the championing of the cause of his caste brethren not only meant endowing them with political power and social respectability, but also demonstrating that the leader himself had remained true to his village-based background.

This close identification was unavoidable because it wouldn't be possible for, say, a city slicker to earn the political loyalty of the mainly rural, caste-based followers. In fact, the sophistication of conduct associated with the urbanites had to be shunned, and the very deficiencies of the backward castes in terms of purported social graces paraded with aplomb.

This attitude was echoed by former West Bengal Finance Minister Ashok Mitra when he said, 'I am a communist, not a gentleman'. Just as the bourgeois gentleman's polished demeanour became a matter of derision for a representative of the proletariat, similarly the backward castes were supposed to take pride in, say, the lack of a working knowledge of English. What was supposedly a drawback for a community became its badge of distinction.

In his personal habits, language, clothes and lifestyle, therefore, Lalu Prasad was a virtual mirror image of the members of his caste who live in the countryside. Unlike any of his predecessors, like Karpoori Thakur, another backward caste chief minister, Lalu Prasad was a master in playing this role.

He made it a point to be seen among his cows, sometimes milking them for the benefit of the television cameras, and living the unostentatious life of a villager, albeit an affluent one. His language consciously retained the kind of rusticity the city-dwellers looked down upon even if they found it amusing.

But it was precisely these tricks of presenting himself as a man of the masses that paid heavy political dividends.

But all good things come to an end. And Lalu Prasad may have overdone his act of playing to the gallery. Not only that, his focus on being the true villager amounted to letting the villages remain exactly as they were for generations - without roads and electricity and with primitive educational and medical facilities.

It was this neglect -- either deliberate or because of oversight of what has come to be known as the bijli-sadak-pani (electricity-roads-water) factor, which proved to be his undoing as chief minister.

Had he played his bucolic part for the first 10 years of his tenure to consolidate his base and then turned to the development issues, he would have been irreplaceable, especially because, as his successful stint in the railway ministry has shown, he has the capability for efficient management.

Towards the end of his 15 years at the helm in Bihar, he did realize the need for turning his attention to development, but it was too late by then.

But what goes around can come around. Who knows that, as the wheels of politics turn, Lalu Prasad can still achieve in Bihar what he has done in Delhi? He is still young, as politicians go.