The Hero’s Journey

One of the world’s most persistent narrative tropes is that of the hero’s journey. The hero, as a boy, bides his time, unaware of his calling, be it Frodo or Neo or Harry Potter or Luke Sky Walker, till he meets a mentor, be it Gandalf or Morpheus or Dumbledore or Obi-Wan Kenobi, who teaches him the skills he needs to go up against the Dark Lord, be it Sauron or Agent Smith or Voldemort or Darth Vader. Along the way, he is helped by friends and companions, be it Samwise or Trinity or Hermione or Han Solo, and the story concludes with evil vanquished and the hero coming of age.

For decades, we have been told of the prophecy of Rahul Gandhi, a man divinely ordained to rule, representing the heroic force of the “idea of India” or the light side of the Force, as evidenced through multiple cover stories and lead articles heralding his rise. But, multiple times, he has fallen to the wiles of the Dark Side, who have been able to paint him as a “Pappu.” It was a devilish trick pushed forth by the All-Seeing-Eye, using Rahul’s own words against him, Incanto Meme-osa. However, there was a problem, one acknowledged by even the prophets who watched over him from afar.

What did the crown prince stand for?

Was he a janeudhari Hindu, who would outflank the Army from the Darkness from the right? Could he out-walk Frodo through Mordor to face off Sauron from the center, smothering him in his “Mohabbat ki Dukaan” blanket and his “Ek Aankh Maroon Bhankaaas” style? Or would he launch an attack from the left, with the light saber of social justice, showing to the world that the evil fascists have nothing to lose but their electoral bonds?

Who was he? What did he stand for?

It is this ambivalence that has characterized Rahul Gandhi’s journey so far, leading many of his critics, the Wormtongues and the Reeta Skeeters, to depict him as a “tabula rasa,” a blank slate who takes on the color of whoever has his ear. So when he is riding the MadhyaPradeshian Falcon captained by Kamal Nath, he veers close to the Kamal Phool. On the other hand, when he is with the Yoya, the wise Jedi master who speaks softly, like the compounder who tells you that the injection won’t hurt before plunging the needle, Rahul Gandhi spouts ideals of the Left, or more accurately, “of the Left, ideals he sprouts.”

But now, and this is why I believe we nearing the climax of the story, Rahul Gandhi has finally outlined his vision. Like it or leave it, this is definitely a line in the sand. 

The first cut of his sword came in his vision of India as a “union of states,” where he described India as not really a nation in the European sense of the term. (Link). In this conception of the country, the states retain their integrity even in their agglomeration into India. They are not to be seen as mere administrative units that can be cut up and merged by the federal government. If we accept this line of reasoning of the United States of India, the States have the right to withdraw their permission to be part of the Union since the state retains their fundamental autonomy. This was very illuminating, coming from the scion of the Nehru family, who, in their long rule over this country, had freely dismissed elected state governments, enforcing the primacy of the strong center over states, and opposed separatist movements in Punjab and Kashmir, claiming the exact opposite: that the identity of states as independent units ceased to be once they voluntarily united and adopted the Indian Constitution. 

The second cut of the sword was his slogan, “Jitni abaadi utni haq.” Following in the lines of progressive movements in the US, this philosophy eschews the old-liberal concept of equality for the notion of equity.  The philosophy that Rahul Gandhi has tethered himself to posits that if any desirable attribute (money, executive positions) is not correlated with the distribution of oppressed groups, the inequality of outcomes is symptomatic of systemic discrimination. Equality is thus seen as exacerbating the problem, which is why equity or positive discrimination is the only way forward for social justice.

Now, if he had left this as a slogan, that would not have been heroic. It would be seen as yet another bumper-sticker word salad thrown without understanding what proposing a pathway.

But no, unlike many politicians, Rahul Gandhi has gone into specifics of how he intends to bring about his vision of equity.

Rahul Gandhi says he wants to conduct two surveys: a caste survey and then a wealth survey, and then ensure that wealth is redistributed in a way. This leads one to believe that if a caste represents x% of the population, they shall have x% of jobs, x% of positions of power, and x% of the nation’s wealth.

A Pol Potterian vision of wealth distribution.

And as his opening gambit, he has promised to transfer 1 lac rupees per year to every household, with the money being direct-transfered to a woman, and through this he has promised to eradicate poverty “in one fell sweep”, an idea as brilliant and never-thought-before as the identity of the Elder Wand. One can see the shadow of Yoda with the Gandalf demeanor, who had written a paper asking for citizen’s wealth to be treated as a national resource, in the same way Luke Skywalker used lessons from Obi-Wan to best Darth Vader.

Some critics say that one should not read much into such pronouncements made in election manifestos. Given that Congress is unlikely to win, they can promise anything they want. It’s like me declaring that I will donate my entire salary to charity if I become the CEO of Google. 

Even if they win, we are told, they will be in a coalition government, and nothing of the killing fields of Cambodia will come to pass. What people are doing by clutching onto Rahul Gandhi’s promise of income redistribution is fear-mongering, a component of the Dark Arts, a means by which the Empire seeks to solidify its authority over the universe.

But this misses the point of the spell that Rahul Gandhi is really going for. He is moving the Overton window with a swish of his magic wand, bringing wealth re-distribution, the nationalization of wealth, caste-based equity, and overarching state rights as legitimate policy positions into the national conversation. This is precisely where the Congress has lost to their opponents, in that they have been able to define the rules of engagement on which elections have been fought: nationalism, mandir, Pakistan, terrorism, and obviously, if these are the Horcruxes in which Voldemort has scattered his soul, there is not much even a hundred Harrys can do.

Of course, Congress, his party, had decades in which to accomplish all of this, but they chose not to. As a matter of fact, it had been Congress’s policy to oppose this very agenda, which, truth be told, is to the left of what even the CPIM has proposed. But now, because Congress will not be dealing with the immediate consequences of these ideas, they are free to use extreme-woke-ideas as a long-term gambit—exactly the lesson Luke Skywalker learns at the end of Empire Strikes Back, of planting the idea of freedom even when the Evil Empire and Darth Vader are too strong to take on, setting him up for victory in “Return of the Jedi.”

The time for dilly-dallying is gone. Whatever criticism one may make of the Congress as it is today, indecision cannot be one of them.

They have shown their hand. 

Darth Shahious. Your move.