A comic take on Mallikarjun Kharge by Arindam Mukherjee/ITGD. A comic take on Mallikarjun Kharge by Arindam Mukherjee/ITGD.

When the Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, rose to speak in the House on Tuesday, little did people know that it would turn out be an 'epic' moment.

Kharge invoked the Mahabharata and said though the Pandavas were few in number compared to the Kauravas, still they could not be defeated.

Curiously, Kharge did not factor in the Congress's crushing defeat in the recent poll battle before he compared his party to the Pandavas, the victors in the epic.

But the wily politician found his way to get around this as well. "We may be 44 in Lok Sabha, but the Pandavas will never be intimidated by a hundred Kauravas."

Amid the thumping of desks, including by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Kharge expressed confidence that the party will bounce back to power and NDA should not think that it will continue to be in power forever.

That is for the future to tell but we can certainly go back in the recent past to find how frequently the Mahabharata has been invoked in our politics and how the great Indian epic is inseparable from our politics.

In April, former PM Manmohan Singh's media advisor Sanjaya Baru claimed in his controversial book 'The Accidental Prime Minister' that UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi had the final say in everything in the UPA government and that it was a "reality that the PM came to terms with" - like Dhritarashtra. He later tried to soften the blow saying, "The PM tried his best given his political limitations. He was like Bheeshma of the Mahabharata, not Dhritarashtra. My book is about UPA I, not UPA II. During UPA I, he was certainly not blind."

But Baru's Dhritarashtra analogy was not original. In November 2013, Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal had called former PM Singh 'Dhritarashtra' when he attacked Singh over the coal blocks allocation scam and the missing coal files. Kejriwal said that Singh kept signing and agreeing on files without speaking and seeing.

Before this, in May 2012, then Team Anna member Prashant Bhushan had likened PM Manmohan Singh to Shikhandi, a character in the Mahabharata. However, he denied this later, but that was not entirely a denial. "I did not call the Prime Minister a 'Shikhandi'. We also know that he is personally not corrupt. But, when PM lets corruption flourish under his leadership, what is the point of personal honesty. Congress party uses him as a 'kavach', or shield just as Shikhandi was used as a shield in Mahabharata."

While allegations of corruption were being made in the run-up to and during the Commonwealth Games, former cricketer and BJP leader Kirti Azad in August 2010 likened those involved in the controversy over the Games projects with characters in the Mahabharata. "Shakuni and Duryodhana are busy making money. The Delhi Government is like the blind-folded Gandhari and you are sitting quiet like Bheeshma Pitamaha," Azad had told then Urban Development Minister S. Jaipal Reddy in the Lok Sabha.

But not all invocations of the great epic are negative. In March 2008, while appealing to the BJP to support the Indo-US nuclear deal, then PM Manmohan Singh appealed to former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee to rise above "narrow" party politics and support the deal in the classical epic style. "Bheeshma Pitamah of Indian politics Atal Bihari Vajpayee should listen to his conscience and let national interest prevail upon narrow politics," Singh had said in the Rajya Sabha.