What does the Mahabharata pastime of Draupadi and all the Pandavas except Yudhisthira falling before they reach the top of the Himalayas signify?

From Labhesh P

Does it prove that Draupadi was partial towards Arjuna, as a controversial novel claims?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. Hare Krishna. Question.
What exactly does the Mahabharata pastime in which all the Pandavas, Indraupadi fall away as Yudhishthira and only Yudhishthira reaches up to the Himalayas and then he goes up to Svarga and then Yudhishthira tells the disqualifications of all the Pandavas because of which they do not rise up to the heavens and there he also says that Indraupadi was partial to Arjuna and that is why she fell. She was not equal in her dealings with the five Pandavas. Answer.
The first point is that the Mahabharata and the Bhagavatam talk about things from different perspectives. The Mahabharata focuses on the principle of pure devotional service and the Mahabharata largely focuses on the principle of Karmakanda. So, we understand that if the specific narratives are different, then there is a Kalpabhed.
The Mahabharata is referring to one and the Bhagavatam is referring to another Kalpa, another time, another time in universal cycles when the Lord descended and these pastimes took place. So, the Bhagavatam describes that actually the Pandavas went back in their self-same bodies to the spiritual world. So, then that is described in the first canto.
Now, regarding the Mahabharata pastime specifically, the Mahabharata, this is referring to a different view and the Mahabharata talks from the Karmakanda point of view and there in the Karmakanda perspective, gaining punya is very important and the more precisely one does one’s duty, then one gets punya accordingly in greater proportion and one’s stockpile of punya is considered when one is going to go to heaven. So, in the case of this specific incident, when we look at what was their deficiency, it was not a very serious deficiency. For example, Arjuna had said that he will be able to conquer the enemy within a specified number of days, very few days and it took him much longer to defeat the Kauravas and then Bhima, it said he would eat too much.
So, he would eat too much and yes, that was true, but is that a sinful activity? No, it is just that he would have more hunger and he would eat. So, these are actually speaking small blemishes and they do indicate that on the path of Karmakanda, one has to do punya very, very precisely to be elevated to swarga and in fact, this pastime cannot be used to justify the kind of partiality that Draupadi had towards Arjuna, which is depicted in this controversial novel. So, this question was based on another question that I asked about, was Draupadi partial to Arjuna? So, actually that novel depicts the whole thing in a very sensual and depraved way where Draupadi is depicted as comparing the five Pandavas in terms of their capacity to provide sensual gratification and that thing of that sort is ever talked about in the Mahabharata and as I mentioned in the earlier answer, actually naturally it was in the Swayamvar, it was Arjuna who won Draupadi.
So, naturally she had attraction to Arjuna and it was also that Arjuna was a heroic Kshatriya, he was the best of the archers in the whole world. So, she had attraction to Arjuna and that is not considered efficiency. All of us have relationships, all of us are human beings and in the human beings, in our relationships, we will gel more with some people and gel less with some other people.
So, being more affectionate to some people is not considered a partiality as long as that does not lead to a deficiency in our performance of duties. So, Draupadi was diligent in doing all her duties to all the Pandavas. That is very clear from the Mahabharata.
But in this specific case, this pastime is told to illustrate how on the path of Punya, even a small deficiency, a small problem, a small blemish can lead to very great problems. The whole pastime basically is ultimately meant to illustrate that rather than trying to do meticulously right on this path of Punya, ultimately we should take the path of Bhakti where by the mercy of Krishna, whatever deficiencies might be there,