How Modi has hijacked Congress legacy

Congress had kept the ingredients of a welfare structure ready. The Prime Minister mixed them together and added the Modi ‘tadka’ to sell them as his.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has slowly, but with sharp focus and political craftiness, appropriated much of the Congress-led governments’ welfare legacy. From Aadhaar to the Direct Benefit Transfer scheme, and from MGNREGS to rural housing — the Modi government has made several of the Congress’ marquee initiatives its own, helping the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) project itself as the great saviour of rural India, as against its predominantly Brahmin Bania image earlier.

With Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s  rural booster through an additional Rs 40,000 crore under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) — a rural job programme conceptualised and introduced by the UPA 1 government — Modi’s dispensation has underscored its commitment to the scheme and to use it to the hilt at the time of an unprecedented crisis.

A hold over rural India was the strength of the Congress as a national party, which has gradually eroded with it ceding space to the earlier more urban-centric BJP. But more significant than the electoral and political implications of this is the symbolism of it all — Modi using Congress’ initiatives to lay the ground of his pro-welfare image.

And how has this been possible? Simply because somewhere down the line, the Congress was foolish enough to abandon its own creations, or not market them as a substantive legacy. Modi, on the other hand, has been clever enough to know the importance of slyly using his rival’s initiatives and then, going on to make them seem like his babies.