Why Centre’s plan to remove Mahatma Gandhi from MGNREGA has triggered a political storm

The renaming — which will see the Centre introduce the Pujya Bapu Grameen Rozgar Guarantee Bill, 2025, in the ongoing Winter session of Parliament — is accompanied by some tweaks: guaranteed workdays may jump from 100 to 125 and minimum wages may be increased to Rs 240 in selected proposals. But these have been drowned under the name itself. The government may genuinely have intended a meaningful upgrade to rural labour rights; unfortunately, the rename has overshadowed everything like a chandelier hung too low in a rented apartment.

The government claims it is simply ‘honouring’ Gandhi, which is touching, until one notices that the honour involves removing ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ and replacing it with the ambiguously devotional ‘Pujya Bapu.’ It really takes a certain kind of political imagination to look at a rural employment scheme named after the most internationally respected Indian in history and conclude that the real problem — the fundamental flaw — is the presence of the words “Mahatma Gandhi.”

But the BJP-led Centre, alert to threats both real and imaginary, has performed a linguistic sleight-of-hand: keep “Bapu” with the Sanskrit-origin generic honorific, “Pujya”, get rid “Mahatma Gandhi,” and hope nobody notices the ideological feng shui happening behind the curtain. The Opposition swears it’s about discomfort not with the Mahatma Gandhi himself, but with the inconvenient fact that his surname is shared by their least favourite political family.

Repositioning Gandhi in nation’s memory

Congress MPs have termed the rename as yet another attempt to clip Gandhi out of the public vocabulary, as if the government were running a large-scale search-and-replace operation: find Gandhi, replace with culturally ambiguous substitute. Jairam Ramesh wanted to know, with all the rhetorical weariness of a man who has asked this question too many times, what moral objection the government could possibly have to the phrase “Mahatma Gandhi.”

KC Venugopal declared that this was yet another attempt to erase Gandhi from the national psyche, especially in villages. Manik Thakur was even more direct: calling Gandhi “Pujya Bapu,” he argued, was not just inaccurate but borderline mischievous. After all, India contains no shortage of spiritual figures who answer to “Bapu,” and political programmes named after them are a recipe for confusion, particularly for the bureaucrat trying to remember which Bapu is being honoured in which department on which day.

Also read: MGNREGA renaming sparks Opposition charge of Hindi imposition

In recent years, critics of the BJP have pointed to a pattern in the party’s public imagery and discourse that suggests its unease with the ‘Gandhi’ brand as a family name directly associated with the Congress leadership. Opposition leaders have argued that this unease stems from the perception that the surname “Gandhi” still carries political capital that could benefit the Congress, particularly in electoral politics, and that the ruling party would prefer to sideline it in favour of alternative historical figures more aligned with its ideological lineage.

Besides, there have been widely shared images from official events and government offices where Mahatma Gandhi’s prominence is diminished or where other freedom figures such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar or Sardar Patel receive greater visual emphasis, a shift seized upon by critics as part of a broader cultural and political recalibration. Some of these instances have reinforced the critique that the current leadership seeks to reposition the nation’s memory around different symbols and away from those most closely associated with the Congress legacy.

Tamil Nadu’s response

Tamil Nadu took the opportunity to remind Delhi that it has spent decades perfecting the art of objecting to Hindi imposition, and no renaming is too small to escape its attention. DMK spokesperson TKS Elangovan declared that central schemes already sound “alien” to Tamil speakers. Elangovan also raised the familiar question: why are funds readily available for Sanskrit’s revival but rarely for Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, or any of the other languages that operate just fine without federal assistance? His conclusion was blunt: the BJP recognises only Hindi and Sanskrit as worthy investments; the rest are electoral décor. His core argument: if you want national unity, maybe stop behaving like Hindi is your firstborn child and the rest are visiting cousins.

Linguist Deiva Sundaram Nainar delivered the academic equivalent of a deadpan roast. “Most such names don’t even enter people’s mouths,” he observed, capturing in one sentence the despair of a population repeatedly expected to produce consonant clusters for official purposes. His Chennai example — one must request “garam pani” to obtain hot water — perfectly captures the everyday frictions of a multilingual nation governed by people who behave as though language politics ended in 1950.

Nainar went further, pointing out that the Constitution itself grants Hindi a structural advantage, a hierarchy integerated into the very system. Tamil Nadu, he argued, settled too easily for the decorative title of “classical language,” allowing the Centre to position this as a cultural trophy and thereby avoid addressing genuine linguistic parity. His nostalgia carried a sharper message when he recalled Jawaharlal Nehru’s assurance that Hindi would not be forced on unwilling states, a promise now referenced with the sort of tone usually reserved for warranties that have expired.

The Communist Party of India’s state secretary, Veerapandian, meanwhile, expanded the debate’s scope by citing the UGC’s latest directive requiring a third language in universities, with Hindi and Sanskrit once again emerging as favourites. To him, it is part of a slow-moving but steady accumulation of measures that transform language from a medium of instruction into a battlefield accessory.

Tagore, Mahatma and the TMC

The linguistic tension is not confined to naming welfare schemes. Recent parliamentary sessions have featured a new pattern: Bills bearing Hindi or Sanskrit titles while the text remains entirely in English. Opposition MPs have objected, arguing this violates Article 348, which requires laws to be in English. The government responds with placid confidence, as if gently reminding everybody that titles are largely decorative and therefore exempt from such constitutional anxiety.

But the contradiction is glaring: India, home to 22 scheduled languages and many more unofficially thriving ones, is now being offered legislation with bilingual schizophrenia: a Sanskrit heading, English clauses, and a political subtext in an entirely different dialect. Critics call this “Hindification.” Supporters, however, say it is “cultural assertion.”

It is in this backdrop that the historical argument re-enters the conversation. Gandhi was not merely a national figure; he was an international symbol, and his title “Mahatma” did not appear out of thin air. Rabindranath Tagore’s deliberate use of the word in 1915 gave it a moral force that stayed put for more than a century. To remove that title now, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) argues, is to quietly snip a thread in the nation’s memory.

The TMC’s official X handle accused the regime of rejecting everything Bengal stands for: its cultural depth, its intellectual lineage, its self-respect, and — most provocatively — its political courage. The party suggested that the current government finds Tagore’s moral framework inconvenient, and Gandhi’s legacy even more so. According to the TMC, the government suffers from an “allergy” to Bengal’s cultural inheritance.

The costs of renaming

For its part, the government appears mystified by the uproar. From its perspective, the addition of “Pujya Bapu” is a mark of reverence, not revisionism. After all, “Bapu” is affectionate, accessible, and widely used. Officials insist that the increase in workdays and wages is what truly matters. The name, they say, is ceremonial, an administrative flourish. But this argument wilts once one observes the degree of attention the government lavishes on ceremonial elements. In a country where monuments, buildings, and stadiums are constantly renamed, the public has grown accustomed to checking if a place still answers to the name it had last week.

The Centre’s defenders argue that Gandhi’s face remains on the currency, his statues remain in streets, and his life remains compulsory reading. To this, the Opposition responds that reducing Gandhi to décor is precisely the worry. The fear is not that Gandhi will disappear entirely, but that he will be turned into a neutral symbol emptied of the political discomfort he once represented.

Also read: Our comprehensive series on the Great Language Divide

This is not a small task. Renaming exercises come with costs — design costs, printing costs, distribution costs, training costs — none of which are mentioned in public briefings. Every rupee spent on a redesign is a rupee not spent on actual wages. But such arguments rarely gain traction in a political climate where symbolism and optics are all that matter.

Meanwhile, linguistic scholars continue to issue advisory notes disguised as academic commentary. They ask whether the new name is accessible, pronounceable, and translatable. They also ask whether a Tamil, Kannada, Manipuri, Assamese, or Marathi speaker can reasonably use it in everyday conversation.

Renaming as a nation pastime

To treat the rename as a one-off would be to ignore a now-established pattern: the Centre has grown fond of retitling everything from railway stations to cities to commissions. The Raj Bhavan becomes Lok Bhavan, the PMO becomes Seva Tirth, and before long one half expects Parliament to be re-christened with an epithet requiring an official abbreviation longer than the original name.

Earlier, we saw how Allahabad became Prayagraj, Faizabad surrendered to Ayodhya, Mughalsarai Junction came to be known as Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay Junction, and Gurgaon gave way to Gurugram, a nod to Guru Dronacharya, which the city has been trying to appropriate, along withc Bhimrao Ambedkar, Sardar Patel and others. Delhi’s Race Course Road was renamed as Lok Kalyan Marg. In this context, MGNREGA’s renaming feels less like a surprise and more like an inevitability, a rite of passage into the era of Sansktritised nomenclature.

Language, in India, is history, identity, and a crowd-sourced memory bank. To rename a national scheme is to tweak the emotional circuitry of millions. And when the rename tilts toward one linguistic tradition over another, the conversation quickly shifts from semantics to sovereignty. The government seems convinced that renaming is a harmless exercise, a matter of housekeeping. But housekeeping, as every household knows, can become political when someone decides to rearrange the living room every few weeks and insist that everyone learn the new seating map.

The new name will likely pass in Parliament, be printed on brochures, and slowly enter official vocabulary. Whether it enters public vocabulary is another matter entirely. India has a long history of shortening official titles into digestible acronyms. The odds are high that Pujya Bapu Grameen Rozgar Guarantee Yojana will eventually be reduced to something like PB-GRGY, which sounds less like a welfare programme and more like a spacecraft.