With UP voting soon, will Budget have schemes named after Shastri, Lohia?

Precedents have been set during the FY15 and FY16 Budgets

Ever since it came to power in May 2014, the Narendra Modi government has displayed a penchant for appropriating legacies of political leaders outside of the Sangh Parivar pantheon. These have included Mahatma Gandhi, BR Ambedkar and Jayaprakash Narayan.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has consistently argued how successive Congress governments ignored their contributions to nation building and extolled only the Nehru-Gandhi family. But even for the BJP and Modi government, attempts at appropriating their legacies has at times coincided with immediate political exigencies.

In the run up to the Bihar assembly polls in October-November 2015 and with an eye to reach out to the significant Dalit electorate in the Hindi heartland, the Sangh Parivar commemorated the 125th birth anniversary of Ambedkar. A special parliament session was called to commemorate Ambedkar’s role as the architect of the Constitution. On October 11, 2015, the birth anniversary of Jayaprakash Narayan, the Modi government felicitated political activists arrested during the Emergency. No such event took place the subsequent year.

The PM’s speeches, programmes of his government and also the Union Budget have all been vehicles to own up these icons. The announcement of schemes named after particular leaders or the frequency with which they find mention in the PM’s speeches has been dictated as much by political demands.

In the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Modi, who was then the Gujarat chief minister, unveiled an ambitious plan to have a statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a ‘statue of unity’, in his home state. The government’s first Budget in 2014 launched schemes named after Gandhi, but also after Sangh Parivar icons. A Syama Prasad Mookerjee Rurban Mission and Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana were launched. On October 2 that year, on the occasion of the Mahatma birth anniversary, Modi launched ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’, or clean India campaign.

With an eye on the Bihar assembly polls, the 2014-15 Budget allocated funds for a Jayaprakash Narayan institute to teach humanities. The PM also paid his obeisance to Madan Mohan Malaviya, the founder of Banaras Hindu University that is located in his Lok Sabha constituency, with the Budget announcing a teachers’ training institute named after him. Malaviya was also conferred the Bharat Ratna that year as was Atal Bihari Vajpayee – both of whom hail from Uttar Pradesh.

The defeats in assembly polls in Delhi and Bihar and the criticism his government faced for trying to amend the land acquisition Bill forced the PM to recast his government’s philosophy from ‘vikas’, or development, to ‘garib kalyan’, or welfare of the poor. The 2015-16 and 2016-17 Budgets had schemes named after Upadhyay – a ‘gramin kaushal yojana’ and ‘Antyodaya Mission’. His birth centenary is being marked as ‘Garib Kalyan Varsh’, or the year for the welfare of the downtrodden.

But the PM’s address to the nation on New Year’s Eve and at the end of the demonetization exercise had him recalling such leaders as former PM Lal Bahadur Shastri, socialist leaders Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan and Congress’ K Kamaraj. Both Shastri and Lohia hailed from UP, while Kamaraj from Tamil Nadu. The BJP hopes to make inroads in Tamil Nadu. Whatever the result of the UP assembly polls, it is important for the party to do well in Bihar and UP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections for it to have any chance at forming the government in New Delhi again.