Old wine in new bottle

The phrase “old wine in a new bottle” captures the recurring and compulsive force that has made name changing a critique of the Modi government’s governance style. Beneath the sheen of new names, fresh slogans, and carefully curated narratives, many policies appear to retain the core design, intent, and structure of earlier initiatives. What changes most visibly is the label-polished, ideologically aligned, and politically marketable. Over the past decade, the government has displayed a clear preference for rebranding inherited schemes rather than openly embracing policy continuity. In addition to renaming places, many welfare programmes conceived under previous administrations are frequently renamed, reframed, and repositioned within new conceptual umbrellas such as Viksit Bharat, Amrit Kaal, or Atmanirbhar Bharat. This linguistic makeover creates an impression of novelty, even when the underlying policy logic remains substantially unchanged. The bottle is unmistakably new; the wine, often familiar.This strategy serves an important political function. Acknowledging continuity would require crediting predecessors-many of whom are ideological rivals. Repackaging allows the ruling party to claim ownership while simultaneously distancing itself from past governments it routinely criticises. In this sense, renaming becomes a tool of political erasure, not policy renewal. Schemes once dismissed as ineffective are later embraced, expanded, and showcased-without an explicit admission that earlier criticism may have been misplaced. The recent move to rename and extend MGNREGA illustrates this dynamic well. The programme’s rights-based framework, its focus on rural employment, and its role as a safety net remain intact. Yet by altering its name and placing it within a new developmental narrative, the government seeks to present the intervention as a fresh reform rather than a continuation of a Congress-era legacy. The addition of extra workdays, while meaningful, does not fundamentally alter the architecture of the scheme; it enhances it at the margins. Still, the new packaging allows the change to be sold as transformational. Defenders of the government argue that rebranding reflects modernization, efficiency, and a break from outdated political symbolism. They contend that names matter because they communicate intent and aspiration. Critics, however, counter that symbolism without substantive change risks reducing governance to a marketing exercise. The fundamental challenges-delayed wage payments, inadequate funding relative to demand, and wages that frequently lag behind state minimums-persist. Furthermore, the push toward digital monitoring and the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) has been a double-edged sword, promising transparency but often resulting in the exclusion of the most marginalized workers due to technical glitches. Ultimately, the charge of “old wine in a new bottle” is less about nostalgia for past policies and more about intellectual honesty in governance. Democracies thrive when continuity is acknowledged and improved upon, not disguised. Reforms gain credibility when they confront inherited strengths and weaknesses transparently, rather than obscuring them behind fresh branding. In the end, no matter how attractively the bottle is designed, citizens judge governance by the taste of the wine. If outcomes improve, the packaging may be forgiven. If they do not, no amount of linguistic innovation can disguise the familiar flavour within.