Name Games

If Rahul Gandhi and the Congress he claims to lead wish to be taken seriously as a challenger to Narendra Modi and the BJP, they might start by choosing their battles better. Instead, the Congress has launched itself into a melodrama over nomenclature by mounting a ‘Save MNREGA’ campaign not because rural India is being short-changed, but because Mahatma Gandhi’s name has been removed from the title of a reworked employment law. In doing so, Gandhi and his party have managed to turn a potentially substantive debate about welfare design and federal finances into a fatuous quarrel over symbolism.

The Modi government has not scrapped the guarantee of rural employment; it has merely replaced the UPA-era Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act with a new statute - the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin). The new law promises 125 days of wage employment per rural household, up from the earlier 100 days, and retains its statutory character.

Yet, Gandhi has framed the change as an assault on rights and evidence of Modi’s “one-man rule” while alleging that the decision was taken by the Prime Minister’s Office without cabinet consultation. Such a claim does little to explain why the party has ignored the more consequential change embedded in the new law: the shift in funding. Unlike MNREGA, which was overwhelmingly financed by the Centre, the new programme requires a 60:40 cost-sharing arrangement between New Delhi and the states. That has real implications for poorer states, fiscal federalism and implementation capacity. This is where the Congress’s outrage comes a cropper.

An Opposition serious about governing would have seized on such details. Does the increased guarantee come with assured funding? Will states already drowning in debt be able to meet their share? Could uneven state capacity lead to patchy delivery and fresh rural distress? Instead, the Congress has chosen to swear oaths to defend a name.

Invoking Mahatma Gandhi has long been the Congress’s emotional reflex. But politics by genealogy is a poor substitute for policy. Rural households care less about whose name adorns a law than whether wages arrive on time and work is actually provided.

There is also a whiff of hypocrisy. When in power, the Congress never hesitated to rebrand schemes or centralise credit. Now it decries rebranding as sacrilege. Worse, by portraying the issue as an attack on Gandhi rather than a restructuring of welfare architecture, it hands Modi an easy riposte that the opposition prefers sentiment to substance.

Gandhi has often accused the PM of ‘distraction politics.’ However, it is he and his party which have often indulged in such theatrics. Instead of a data-driven assault on the Modi government’s priorities, the Congress prefers to fritter away time and political capital on a semantic crusade.

By mistaking symbolism for strategy, Rahul Gandhi once again confirms his knack for missing the open goal while Modi watches untroubled from the other end of the pitch.