If Rahul is to be believed, Pandavas were opposed to GST, demonetisation

Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra is now on its penultimate lap, traversing through Punjab-in a fortnight's time it should reach its destination, Srinagar in Jammu & Kashmir.

- SHUBHABRATA BHATTACHARYA

Going by the bizarre insights on India's past enunciated by the former president and present principal patron of the Grand Old Party, let us keep our fingers crossed: he may disclose some rare aspect of the history of Kashmir (unheard of so long) or throw some new "light" on the accession of the territory to the Indian Union. (He is clearly in the Gupkar Alliance camp, as Farooq Abdullah has walked alongside him on the outskirts of Delhi and Mehbooba Mufti is expected to be by his side when he is in the vale.) I write this in the light of the decrees on Mahabharat which emanated while he was traversing Haryana, where Kurukshetra is located. According to RahulG, the Pandavas were tapaswis (ascetics); they were five in number and in the Mahabharat war they were up against the Sangathan (organisation) of the Kauravs (a reflection that an organisationally truncated Congress faces the formidable Sangh Parivar?); they were backed by people from all religions; and they never imposed GST or promulgated demonetisation. A rare insight indeed—he may like to elaborate how many religions were in vogue in India during the Mahabharat period. Also, while ancient India having democratic institutions is recorded history, so far no scholar has fathomed that a tax like GST existed in those venerable times and that demonetisation as a concept had evolved. With his ruffled beard (his image makers, the outsourced Bombay based start-up called Teen Bandar, perhaps have advised that the beard gives the look of a man in anguish, whose commitment and urgency to his cause does not even give him time to trim) RahulG, sporting a tilak when he visits Hindu shrines and a turban while paying obeisance at a Gurudwara, projects himself as a tapaswi. He asked his audiences why BJP and Sangh leaders never say Har-harMahadev or Jai Siya Ram— omitting Sita. (The tertiary Sangh media team immediately posted on social sites Narendra Modi’s speeches in Varanasi during the openi