But Laloo Prasad Yadav is proving too hard a nut to crack. Twice in the last six months, the BJP Government has come close to creating constitutional crises in its undying effort to plant a saffron flag in that rotten State and thus cleanse it of its filthy Jehanabads. The first crisis came when the President returned for reconsideration the first Cabinet decision to dismiss the Rabri Devi Government and the next one when the BJP Government realised, a bit late in the day, that it could not get the requisite majority in the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, to ratify the Presidential proclamation imposing President's Rule in Bihar.

So much fretting and fuming and eating of words and humble pies over a Government elected by the people of the State. After all that, Rabri Devi, wife of Laloo Prasad Yadav, is back as Chief Minister of Bihar. Worse, Bihar is back to being a rotten State after one week of being a glorious State ruled by the Governor and BJP strongman S S Bhandari. In other words, the BJP has helped embellish the image of Laloo Prasad Yadav as the true Bihari strongman who cannot be touched let alone sacked. This, of course, will go a long way in helping Yadav return to power when elections are held early next year.

Laloo can rightly say that with such enemies as the BJP you do not need friends. The question now is what comes during the rule of Rabri Devi, Part II. What happens if the Ranvir Sena, the private army of high-caste Bhumihars, strikes once again against lower castes who are protected by the Marxist extremist group, the CPI(M-L), and other factions? Quite a possible scenario considering that the BJP-Samata Party fight is out of Parliament and back on the streets and villages of Bihar. Will the BJP go in for another week of President's Rule? And will the Congress president Sonia Gandhi, whose single-minded resolve to humiliate the BJP - even going against her party's State unit which preferred President's Rule to Laloo's rule - continue to taunt the ruling party?

Now that Bihar of behind them, sorry, in front of them, what options does the Vajpayee-led Government have? To continue as a lame duck Government and let Sonia Gandhi set the national agenda? Sonia Gandhi, who is not even a Member of Parliament but breezes in and out of the Parliament building where she has an office, has been trying to form a formidable anti-BJP plank with the Marxist Chief Minister of West Bengal Jyoti Basu. So she will continue to stonewall any major BJP Government initiative. A recent vicious piece against Basu by a columnist who draws inspiration and ideas from the Ashoka Road office of the BJP, is indication of how rattled the BJP is by the very thought of such a formulation working out.