New Delhi, April 15 :     From Narad?s role in Sita?s swayamvar to Rahim?s couplets, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Laloo Prasad Yadav kept the lacklustre debate on the government?s confidence motion alive this afternoon. At his rustic best, his digs ? delivered in his ?meethi Bihari boli? ? carried more punch than the logic and heavy statistics most others fell back upon. Laloo saw a ?matwala? and a ?bhola? (a good man isolated in his own world) in the Prime Minister, a ?matwala? who was unaware that his house was being wrecked from within. The wrecker was his home minister L.K. Advani. And the former Bihar chief minister found ?tortured? souls in the disregarded and ignored Sushma Swaraj and Madan Lal Khurana. In between, he tried to stoke the dissent brewing within Samata Party. He underlined his reverence for his ?chacha? from Gopalganj, Abdul Ghafoor, long sidelined within Samata and left out of the Union Cabinet. He extolled the courage of Shakuni Chowdhury, another Samata dissident, for defying Nitish Kumar and George Fernandes. Laloo was acerbic towards Fernandes, his guru of the socialist days, when he was a first-term MP in 1977. He said Fernandes was still as careless as before about his clothes, had kept himself trim and his kurta still did not sit tight on him. But he had changed sides and had forgotten about the way he would swear by socialist leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia and Raj Narayan. Bihar, Rabri Devi and other leaders from Bihar like the BJP?s Yashwant Sinha kept recurring in his hour-long speech. He wondered where Sinha ? a former bureaucrat ? was when he was a struggling politician. ?You were an IAS then. These people (IAS) have this uncanny ability to grab high posts.? Laloo?s wit clashed with Mamata Banerjee?s ego. Mamata was hurt when Laloo commented upon the BJP denying her a Cabinet berth. Mamata insisted that she had only said she preferred the railways berth and had not really demanded it. Laloo retorted: ?Nahi manga to nahi diya (You didn?t ask for it, so you didn?t get it).? As the first speaker for the treasury benches after the Prime Minister had initiated the motion, Advani said: ?I am known as a hardliner.? Then he transgressed into typical Vajpayee terrain. He referred to India as a nation where a single religion could not prosper and where its religious diversity could never be throttled. ?Otherwise, the framers of our Constitution would have declared it a Hindu state in the same way Islam was imposed in Pakistan and those not practising Islam relegated to the status of second-grade citizens,? he said. Blaming the Opposition for this well-orchestrated campaign of proclaiming a rift between him and his leader, he said there were few leaders of Vajpayee?s stature and ability. He listed Pokhran, Agni and the Lahore bus ride as the big achievements of the Vajpayee government and remembered to add that peace in Kashmir, (for which credit should go to him) was another feather in its cap. Sinha did what he does best: he rattled off statistics about the government?s performance. When Laloo continued to disturb him with his comments, Sinha retorted: ?Papi ka diya hua baddua nahi lagta (A curse from a sinner never comes true).? Sedapati Muthaiah, one of Jayalalitha?s trusted lieutenants, read out from a written speech which was a compilation of the Vajpayee government?s unfulfilled promises to the ADMK, and therefore, the people of Tamil Nadu. But he failed to carry the logic of a party that was dumping the government and had precipitated the confidence motion itself. After P.A. Sangma completed his carefully-argued speech, the field was left to political lightweights. Time has been reserved for the bigwigs tomorrow when the political drama intensifies.