The latest attack of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS’s) mouthpiece Organiser on Sonia Gandhi and the National Advisory Council (NAC) by describing the NAC as “a classic takeover of the Dimagi Naxals of governance,” is revealing not simply for what it says about the Congress and its leadership, but for its hostility to the rights-based approach to social policy that took shape during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) years.The NAC became an important institutional site for this effort, but the expansion of rights cannot be attributed to it alone. It reflected the convergence of the Congress’s inclusive-democratic inheritance with sustained pressure from the Left parties and civil society groups outside government.For a brief period, these forces came together to push welfare beyond discretionary state provision and towards legally enforceable social and economic rights. That experience deserves attention at a time when not only these gains but also political rights, including the right to vote, are under growing strain.The UPA years marked the first sustained attempt to articulate an Indian version of a strategy centred on social entitlements. The government enacted four laws that sought to give statutory backing to key claims: the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which gave people an unprecedented instrument to scrutinise government; the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which created a legal guarantee of employment; the Forest Rights Act (FRA), which sought to address the historical dispossession of forest communities; and the Right to Education (RTE) Act, which made elementary education a legal entitlement. The Sangh’s mindless opposition to an initiative like the NAC, which focused on implementing welfare measures and enacting laws having long-term benefits, is a self goal.NAC represented an important beginningThe framework was necessarily limited by the political and economic circumstances of the time, but it represented an important beginning. Its significance lay in shifting the language of welfare from discretionary government provision towards legally enforceable guarantees, and in redefining the relationship between citizens and the state. Livelihood, information, forest rights and education were increasingly framed not as acts of state benevolence but as claims citizens could make upon the state.None of this was the work of the NAC alone. The Left parties, whose parliamentary support was crucial to the UPA-I government, played a decisive role in pressing for stronger legislation and resisting attempts to dilute it. This support was instrumental in countering opposition within the government to these measures, including among sections of the bureaucracy and, most importantly, from powerful economic lobbies and corporate interests. The eventual laws emerged from negotiation and contestation. Their enactment despite such resistance is precisely what makes the process noteworthy: what took shape was a negotiated, albeit brief, experiment in extending rights through the state.The UPA’s record in this sphere did not transcend neoliberalism. It was grafted onto a market-oriented growth process and therefore did not challenge the primacy of big capital. In many respects, these programmes functioned as compensatory correctives rather than as a fundamental reorientation of development. This generated legitimate debates about public expenditure, state capacity and redistribution. Economic elites portrayed them as fiscally irresponsible and hostile to growth, while sections of the urban middle class dismissed them as populist largesse. However, these critiques do not diminish the importance of treating social rights as claims upon the state.The political and institutional space for such entitlements created during the UPA period is now being actively eroded as part of an attempt to discredit that opening. The Forest Rights Act remains on the statute book, but the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023, has facilitated the diversion of forest land for infrastructure projects, with serious implications for community rights. The RTI Act was amended in 2019 and 2023, weakening the independence and tenure of information commissioners. MGNREGA, once a statutory guarantee of employment, has been replaced by the Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Aajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G), fundamentally altering a rural employment programme that has supported millions of rural households, particularly during natural disasters and economic downturns.The new framework undermines the legal right to work by recasting it as a development programme subject to fiscal constraints and digital compliance requirements.This retreat from demands and guarantees matters today. In this context, the differences between the UPA and National Democratic Alliance (NDA) are significant: they reflect different conceptions of the place of rights in a democracy. The contrast also helps underline Congress-Left engagement, which brought two historically antagonistic traditions onto common social ground. The target of the current campaign, therefore, is not merely Sonia Gandhi or the NAC. It is a conception of politics in which the state has obligations towards those it governs, accountability matters, and redistribution and social protection are legitimate political objectives.Replacing the language of rights with one of duties and obligationsThe Right has increasingly sought to replace the language of rights with one of duties and obligations. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders, including the prime minister, have repeatedly emphasised duties over rights. In one striking formulation, the prime minister argued that the emphasis on rights over the past 75 years had “played a huge role in keeping India weak.”Against this backdrop, the strain now placed on the equal political right to vote through the implementation of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is especially significant, with the process resulting in mass disenfranchisement in several states.The UPA’s interventions to expand rights should be judged critically, but on their political and substantive merits. Serious political criticism does not require dismissing them through accusations of conspiracy or anti-national intent. Such language substitutes assertion for argument, recasting disagreement with a political project as a challenge to its legitimacy. More broadly, under the current regime, the trajectory of rampant privatisation and intensified capitalism, particularly in essential sectors such as education and healthcare, impedes rather than advances the pursuit of equality.The RSS’s stand is historically obtuse and anti-peopleThis reveals something about the Indian Right that goes beyond its majoritarianism. It has considerable difficulty acknowledging any legitimate contribution of previous governments, especially the Congress, to the expansion and deepening of democracy. The political history of the republic is consequently recast as a struggle between an allegedly authentic nationalism and those who are permanently suspect.Congress’s achievements become appeasement; Left’s influence becomes subversion; efforts to expand rights become populism or fiscal irresponsibility; and institutions designed to make the state accountable become objects of suspicion.The irony is considerable. The UPA’s efforts to expand social and economic entitlements were attempts, however incomplete, to make the Indian state more responsive to ordinary people. To condemn them as anti-national is therefore not merely historically obtuse; it is also anti-people, since it denies the democratic value of expanding these entitlements. An inclusive conception of the nation should be able to recognise these contributions as part of India’s political development rather than erase them from history or attribute conspiratorial motives to them. The denigration of social policy aimed at strengthening these protections is ultimately an effort to delegitimise an important political project and, in doing so, to narrow the meaning of Indian democracy itself.Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.