The Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G) replaces the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), a social safety net that has sustained crores of India’s poorest citizens. There are many troublesome provisions in the new scheme, and it will have an immediate and disastrous impact upon those whose lives depend upon MGNREGA. But the greatest long-term damage the new scheme will inflict, probably by design, is to the sense in the minds of people that they possess rights; inalienable rights that the state is obliged to fulfill. When the sense of rights fades from our collective memory, we are reduced in our political stature from citizens who demand and fight for our rights to subjects who tamely accept our fate. The only beneficiaries of such an erosion in political consciousness are those seeking to eliminate the resistance of citizens to their project of recolonising India.In describing the goal for his politics, Mahatma Gandhi said, “I will work for an India in which the poorest shall feel it is their country, in whose making they have a voice” (Young India 10/9/1931). This is a revolutionary political position. It does not purport to merely feed, clothe and educate the poor, it aspires to transfer the reins of the country over to the poor and let them decide the shape the country will take.The Constitution Babasaheb drafted, enshrined the same revolutionary idea of transferring ownership and control of the country to its people. With the adoption of our Constitution, India went from being a fief of the powerful few to a republic that belonged to all within it. Indians went from being a mass of mute subjects at the mercy of an overlord to individual citizens empowered to define their own destiny. At the core of this profound political transition is the concept of the right.Subjects have no rights; they only have duties that flow from the service they are bound to render to their masters. Citizens on the other hand have rights, that as Lokmanya Tilak famously pointed out, are inherent by birth. Recognising people as citizens and imbuing them with rights is not simply a humanitarian matter, it is the fundamental prerequisite for democracy. A mass of subjects herded towards a vote does not constitute a democracy. Democracy requires citizens, alive to their rights and exercising their franchise to define, defend and expand those rights.But rights cannot be established simply by enshrining them in the Constitution. For rights to come alive, they must enter the political consciousness of our people. Rights cannot merely exist on paper, they must enter the lived experience and the political imagination of the owners of the right. This requires us to chip away at the injustices, social, economic, and political that keep people from exercising their rights. It requires the creation of forums where these rights can be exercised, experienced, and internalised.MGNREGA was a landmark legislation not just because it created a new right, the right to work, but in doing so it also created a platform where the most powerless people in India could exercise their right and discover their power as citizens. In this respect, MGNREGA was very much like our right to vote, but unlike voting that happens only once in a few years, MGNREGA allowed people the experience of exercising their rights for a hundred days a year.MGNREGA reinforces the notion of a right at many levels. The employment and income generated by MGNREGA eases the everyday struggle for survival and creates the space to aspire to rights. The employment undertaken in MGNREGA comes not at the pleasure of the state but in response to the demand that a citizen makes for the delivery of their right to work. The idea of the citizen’s right over the state is reinforced by making the state liable to compensate those whose rights it cannot fulfill. MGNREGA also institutionalises the power of the local community over the state. The work to be undertaken in the village does not descend from above but is instead determined in the deliberation of the gram sabha.In a land where the ‘sarkar (government)’ is seen as all powerful, this is a revolutionary inversion in the power-relation. The power and agency that that MGNREGA brings to the poor is not limited to worksite. MGNREGA gives those who have only their labour to sell the power of an option. The guarantee of alternative employment in MGNREGA strengthens the power of the poor to bargain in the local market for labour, thereby challenging long-standing structure of caste and feudal relations.Finally, MGNREGA provides a cause around which the most marginalised people in communities around India have collectivised in the form of agitations, movements, and unions that have brought further voice to the most voiceless. MGNREGA is not just a mechanism to guarantee employment, it is a medium to develop citizenship of the Indian people.Modi ji’s latest abomination is an attack on every one of these processes to reinforce the sense of rights. To begin with, the scheme is sunk before it starts since it is unlikely that any state will have the wherewithal to contribute the 40% of the share of the cost expected. But even where it will be implemented it will bear no resemblance to MGNREGA. Employment is not a guarantee but instead a largess granted at the will of the government. The scheme is suspended during the months of peak labour demand ensuring that those dependent on manual labour for their livelihood will be at the mercy of the few who can employ them.Rather than trust the gram sabhas to decide what the community needs, a bureaucrat will now tell the community what work it must undertake. In short VBGRAMG is not just an attack on the right to work, it is an attack on the very idea of rights. It has been designed to make people forget the notion of their rights and instead encourages them to see themselves as subjects gratefully receiving the largess of their new kings.This is the very opposite of the vision Mahatma Gandhi had for the people, and especially the poorest people of India. Associating his name with a legislation that diminishes the economic, social, and political freedom that he fought all his life for would be a grievous insult to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi. We should therefore be grateful that Modi ji has dropped the ‘MG’ from the name of his new scheme. The scheme also adheres to no principle of Ram Rajya and so it would be only fair to dissociate the name of Lord Ram from this scheme as well. VB-G RAM G does align with the political dream for which Nathuram Godse killed Gandhi ji. Perhaps the RAM in VB-G RAM G refers to Nathuram?Sachin Rao is a Congress Worker.