For someone who grew up as an “unswerving socialist”, as Nitish’s biographer-friend Arun Sinha puts it in Nitish Kumar and The Rise of Bihar (2011), and was drawn towards Lohia’s writings in his student days at Sri Ganesh High School at Bakhtiyarpur in Patna district, it was an embarrassment when the Chhapra-based Jai Prakash University (JPU) unceremoniously dropped works of both his idols—ironically, the university itself is named after JP—from its PG syllabus of political science recently. At the same time, the varsity included BJP ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyay along with Subhash Chandra Bose and Jyotiba Phule in the course. Apart from Lohia and JP, material on and by Dayanand Saraswati, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Bal Gangadhar Tilak were also dropped. But it was primarily the exclusion of Lohia and JP that kicked up a row; the inclusion of Upadhyay, in particular, was interpreted as a bid to saffronise education.