You are no Pandavas Mr. Rahul Gandhi

Rallying INC workers for a tough fight ahead, you, Mr. Rahul Gandhi evoked Hindu epic Mahabharata and compared BJP/RSS to the Kauravas and Congress to Pandavas. While  the Congress eco-system is visibly happy with you finally delivering some coherent thoughts.

BJP supporters should be happy that they BJP is being compared with the Kauravas, far more inferior insults have been used by your party for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Such a casual invoking of a complex epic like Mahabharata is laughable. Let’s however anyway analyze your claim for academic purposes.

From the INC website, this is the exact transcript of the relevant part of your speech:

“thousands of years ago, there was a great battle, a huge battle on the fields of Kurukshetra. The Kauravas were powerful, extremely well organized and arrogant. They had money and numbers on their side. They fought a small army led by Pandavs. The Kauravas were drunk with power and believed they were the greatest. The Pandavs were humble. They did not speak much. They spoke softly. They were five brothers who had recently lost everything but unlike the Kauravs, they fought for truth. Like the Kauravs, the BJP and RSS are designed to fight for power. Like the Pandavs, the Congress is designed to fight for the truth.”

First, let us see, according to you what were the qualities of two groups

Kauravas: Powerful, extremely well organized, arrogant, had money and numbers on their side, drunk with power and believed they were the greatest.

Pandavas: Had a small army, lost everything, fought for truth, were humble and didn’t speak much.

Now let us go through these traits one by one and see where you and your party fits.

First, on your side not being Kauravas:

1. Powerful: Well no harm in being powerful. A powerful organization will have a better chance of giving a stable government and take tough decisions. A weak leader can’t serve the nation.
2. Extremely well organized: This is actually a very good quality.
3. Arrogant: Okay, now we have some serious charge. From Oxford dictionary, arrogant is someone “having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities”.
   Who is the one who said Congress is default Operating System of India, isn’t that exaggerated sense of one’s own importance? There are just so many examples of your arrogance. Your party leader Mani Shankar Ayer thought fit to dismiss BJP as not a credible threat to your party’s rule during the 2014 elections, promising that Modi would never be prime minister of India and  could sell tea in a congress meet-up. The epitome of arrogance is perhaps your father Rajiv Gandhi, who justified the murder of thousands of innocent civilians as a mere aftereffect of a big tree falling.
4. Money: I would not really trust any political parties on their balance sheets. Especially your party Congress, who has been in power for far greater period of independent India and definitely have lots of money at their disposal.
5. Number: Not sure which numbers you mean. Elections are not a fist fight so that the actual number of party workers would matter that much. In terms of the ability to convey messages to the voters, Congress and BJP might have almost same level of resources. In fact, given that most of old media houses favors Congress, you actually are in superior position here.
6. Drunk with power: This is almost same as being arrogant, discussed above.

Now coming to you being Pandavas:

1. Small army: As discussed above, you really don’t have a small army.
2. Lost everything: Yeah, you are in pretty poor condition if you see the states you are in power. But come to think of it, Pandavas lost mainly due to unfair treatment meted out to them. You lost because of your own doings.
3. Humble: Again, as above in arrogant. You are no humble Mr. Rahul Gandhi.
4. Didn’t speak much: That doesn’t seem to be true. Even if it were true, how is not speaking much a good quality? Dr. Manmohan Singh also didn’t speak much and let the country ruled by a proxy for 10 years. Perhaps you meant that they didn’t speak out of line and were thus highly disciplined. Discipline is hardly a quality of Congressmen. You tore a government ordinance, publicly shaming PM Dr. Manmohan Singh, who was on a state visit to US.

If you actually had any understanding of Mahabharata, you wouldn’t have invoked the binary of Kauravas and Pandavas to emphasize the dichotomy of good vs evil. Mahabharata is much more complex and neither side is pure good or pure evil.

Do you know that Pandavas also used unfair means as well to win the battle? Especially to take down all the major characters on the Kaurava side. Disarming Bhishma by propping Shikhandi, disarming Dronacharya using fake news of his son’s death, killing Karna while he was fixing his chariot and thus unarmed, and killing Duryodhna by hitting below the belt. Or do you Mr. Rahul Gandhi actually are advocating the use of unfair means to win elections. Is this why you are using Cambridge Analytica’s services?

I do not know about BJP, but you Mr. Rahul Gandhi are no Pandava.