Whether we admit to it or not, we need Rahul Gandhi more than he needs us. It’s a fact of life and as soon as we man up to it, the healthier it is for god, Gujarat and country.

The last time there was such a ruckus over anyone’s return from the Big Empty was when Amitabh Bachchan recovered from a coma after getting badly injured on the sets of Coolie. Even though Bachchan was a bit more successful in his field before his debacle than Rahul before his, the actor’s ‘return’ to us in 1982 – from the known precincts of Breach Candy Hospital — was after seven days. Rahul’s return on an indeterminate date in human history, on the other hand, was after a maddening never-to-be-confirmed 56 days without us knowing whether he was in Uttarakhand, Uruguay, the Renkoji temple, Italy, Myanmar, all the above, or none of the above.

As Rahul slung a ploughshare over his shoulder and waved furiously using only his wrist and nothing else as a pivot from the dais of the Ram Lila ground at the Kisan-Khet rally on Sunday, the nation could finally breathe and smirk again. To quote a 1990s boy band, “Backstreet’s back, alright!”

The emptiness we felt over the last eight weeks was palpable and has been since identified as postpartum. One feels worst for those who passed away in those 56 days, never to know whether Rahul would ever return or not. The grab on news channels showing two puppies and a blur in the back seat of a car speeding away towards 12 Tughlaq Lane on Thursday was so reassuring that notoriously workaholic and social life-starved cabinet-rank ministers of the central government are now reportedly contemplating on travelling with cute critters to dispel the notion that they are robots working for a robot.

When I say we need Rahul Gandhi, I mean everyone one of us: the media, the various cabals within the Congress, the prime minister, farmers, Modi-loving trolls, unborn babies… It isn’t for his qualities as a politician that we want Rahul to stay in politics. And it certainly isn’t for his qualities as a Parliamentarian, since if that were the case, it would be like missing the Invisible Man in a group photo.

We need Rahul because he is the gold standard of failure for our own failures to appear less damning. We need him as a comforting object of ridicule, a subject for memes on social media, a benchmark for gloriously irrational behaviour, a delicious comic character whose genius lies in his ability to be Peter Parker without having special spider powers. He fulfils our need to flaunt our recently-acquired post-feudal antipathy towards dynastic politics. He also helps us come closer to understanding the mystery of the seven o’clock shadow and the logic of rolling up sleeves without any manual labour to follow.

Especially at a time when our prime minister insists that we laugh with him and never at him, when the liberal secular lot have started to bore even the liberal secular lot, and when the mad, bad and dangerous brigade insist on hearing ‘Knock, knock’ jokes as jibes against Hindus, having Rahul among us is like having cough syrup in a household of teetotallers.

Rahul was gone for less than two months and the nation was left debating about dead people – Nehru, Ambedkar — and the yet-to-return Subhas Bose, and got worrying about having to pay for Google and WhatsApp in the near future. What marks Rahul out from every other public entity is that he unfailingly provides us with meat to make real news-sausage out of.

After taking over as Congress vice-president in January 2013, his statement about the “power so many people seek is actually poison” may have sounded like part of a cunning plan worthy of departed CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat. But Rahul’s continuation in Congress politics — if no longer in national politics — is far more damaging to himself than to the Congress any more.

And that is precisely what makes Rahul so precious to everyone, especially to his critics. He is the Neelkantha of Indian politics, taking in all the poisons of Indian power politics and not cleansing the system (or even the Congress) of its toxins in the process, but providing all of us with a comforting, liberating spectacle in an otherwise dreary, bombastic opera run by stentorian folks.

Along with retelling Punjabi, Haryanvi and UP farmers on Sunday about his exploits at Bhatta-Parsaul and Niyamgiri, the detoxed sabbatical-returned could have quoted Bachchan’s last lines from Coolie that Manmohan Desai had introduced after his recovery: “Main to chala gaya tha. Laut aaya hoon to bus aapki duaon se.”

No matter, Rahul. We love having you back.