PM Narendra Modi and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar at a rally in Patna last month
The questions and answers are flying faster than a certain talk show's totemic buzzer round. The day began with
Nitish Kumar posting an open letter to the Prime Minister on Twitter. By sunset, he had received a response - addressed loftily by the PM's party and its allies to "
the people of Bihar."
The reply did not waffle. It anointed Mr Kumar, 63, a practitioner of "ABCD" politics - "Arrogance, Betrayal, Conspiracy and Deceit"; it mocked his zeal for social media as that of a recent convert, pointing out that Mr Kumar had once described Twitter as "irrelevant"; and it professed "
Bihar is not Nitish, Nitish is not Bihar!"
The surmise festooned with an exclamation point was a rejoinder to Mr Kumar claiming in his letter, addressed to "Respected Modiji", that the PM, by declaring the Chief Minister's DNA questionable at a recent election rally, has "disrespected the lineage of our people".
"I am a son of Bihar. My DNA is the similar as that of the people of Bihar," Mr Kumar wrote, urging the PM to "please consider taking back these words."
Mr Kumar's campaign team says the "DNA insult" is "our chaiwallah moment" - in the run-up to the national election, Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar had derisively referred to the PM's young years spent as a tea seller at railway stations. The pillory was adroitly leveraged by the PM and his party as evidence of his simple background and first-hand experience in fighting poverty.
The letters - and a Twitter interview that saw Mr Kumar taking questions from users - also reveals that the Chief Minister and the BJP are still smarting from his decision, two years ago, to end his party's long alliance with the BJP after it chose Mr Modi as its presumptive Prime Minister. "The rest is history," the BJP crows in its letter today.