The Opposition was initially protesting the renaming of MGNREGA. Their question: why remove Gandhi’s name from a scheme the country has long known as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act? Why scrub Gandhi out of it? 

At first, even I felt a twinge of regret. The proposed new name—‘Viksit Bharat–Rozgar aur Aajeevika Guarantee Mission (Rural) Bill’—is clunky and reminiscent of an old habit of dreaming up an English acronym and then force-fitting Hindi words into it. But after reading the draft of the new law the government plans to bring in to replace MGNREGA, I thought it was just as well. What good would it serve to retain his name when the soul of the programme had been gouged out, when its foundational guarantees dismantled?

Let’s try and understand why MGNREGA was not just any old piece of legislation, why it was historic. Nearly sixty years after Independence, the Indian state took a tentative step towards fulfilling a core constitutional obligation. Articles 39(a) and 41 of the Directive Principles of State Policy enjoin the government to secure for every citizen an adequate means of livelihood (Art. 39) and the right to work (Art. 41). Nearly six decades after this was written into the Constitution, the UPA government finally passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Parliament in 2005, granting—for the first time—a legally recognisable right to the country’s poorest citizens.

This was not a........

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