I am not an expert on rural employment policy. So, I cannot offer an analysis of whether the new Viksit Bharat—Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) is better or worse than the old Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.
But I have (mis)spent a large chunk of my life in advertising and marketing, so here is my take on the name the government has chosen to bestow on its latest grand scheme.
Scheme names today are not chosen casually, as they once were in more innocent—or, perhaps, just less canny—times. Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, for instance, does not lend itself easily to a coded, catchy abbreviation that can be quickly grasped by rural youth across India. It is a clunky mouthful. Considerable effort went into contorting it into the easily uttered ‘MNREGA’, and even then the nickname carried no coded meaning.
The Viksit Bharat—Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin), on the other hand, arrives fully market-ready, complete with an artfully engineered nickname—VB-G RAM G.
Offended by my use of ‘artfully’? Then, look more closely at ‘Ajeevika’. What is it even doing there? It isn’t even the correct word. The term commonly used in state-level policies is ‘Jeevika’, meaning livelihood, which is itself superfluous because ‘Rozgar’ has already done that job. Ajeevika, in fact, refers to an ancient philosophical school that argues human effort cannot change fate and promotes a life of asceticism.
(The word ajeevika means livelihood in Sanskrit—Editor.)
To be fair to those who named the policy, I doubt they are followers of this ancient—and sadly twisted—philosophy! I do, however, think that they are guilty of sneaking an ‘A’ into the policy name just so they can bung in a ‘mission’ after it, and thus shoe-horn the name of their preferred god into what should be an entirely secular, public-funded programme. The addition of a G, before and after RAM, makes the entire nickname cringingly servile—Ji, Ram Ji.
Is this how the government is instructing rural youth to accept the scheme? With folded hands and reverentially bowed head and an attitude of “thy will be done”?
And, why only rural youth? Ji Ram Ji, increasingly, seems to be the attitude urged upon all of us. Influential film critics and major film stars are flayed on social media for daring to voice even mild disagreement with the politics or intentions of films like the latest right-wing offering, Dhurandhar.
If Hrithik Roshan—a man previously loved for being the only ‘Roshan’ (bright) among a phalanx of Khans—cannot be spared for tacking on one line of criticism to his otherwise fulsome review (“I may disagree with the politics of it, and argue about the responsibilities, we, filmmakers, should bear as citizens of the world”), what indulgence can the rest of us hope for?
Summarily dismissing critics of propaganda (who question the naming of massive, public-funded policies, or the content of mass cinema) as paranoid, evil or jobless is hazardous to democracy. It shuts down debate, renders logic irrelevant, closes its eyes and shuts its ears to all lessons that history has to offer and rams (that’s me being artful now) the version the powers-that-be prefer down the throat of the public, no matter whether they have its consent or not.
Ji, Ram Ji.
editor@theweek.in