Fighting spirit

With its depleted bench strength of just 44 MPs in the Lok Sabha and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s reluctance to have its parliamentary party leader designated Leader of the Opposition, the Congress is desperately fending off speculation about its ineffectiveness as an Opposition party. To reinforce the perception of strength, it is even resorting to the BJP's technique of leveraging mythology and religion. First, it was Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress leader in the Lok Sabha, who compared the Congress to the five Pandavas of the Mahabharata and reminded the BJP, overwhelmed with its majority, that "The Kauravas were big in numbers but the Pandavas never gave in." Then recently, a Congress spokesperson trotted out a famous quote from Sikh Guru Gobind Singh to show that the party enjoyed a strength that belied the number of seats in the lower House: "Savah Laakh Se Ek Laraoun, ... ." (I will make one fight 125,000, then my name shall be Gobind Singh.)