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Background
Wanting power, and what wanting it costs.
The war has a stated cause: Duryodhana will not concede five villages. Krishna's final embassy asks for that and nothing more, and is refused. The whole catastrophe rests on a demand small enough to make the refusal legible as something other than politics.
The epic's reading of that refusal is not that Duryodhana wanted land. It is that conceding anything would have meant conceding the claim itself — and the craving in question is for standing rather than for territory.