A video from the Labharthi Utsav (festival for beneficiaries) organised by the Rajasthan government on Monday went viral on social media. In the video, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot is seen quizzing a woman over video conference on the number of welfare schemes she is availing. After the woman, a widow, the lone earning member in a household of two children and ageing mother-in-law, lists out the schemes she has enrolled for, and Mr. Gehlot asks, “Do you have cows?” Pat comes the reply, “No, I only have a mithu (parrot)”. Mr. Gehlot’s question was aimed at enlightening her about his government’s cattle insurance scheme — Mukhyamantri Kamdhenu Pashu Bima Yojana. But there aren’t any government insurance schemes, at least yet, for pet parrots.
The Gehlot government is on an overdrive highlighting a bouquet of welfare schemes, and reaching out to individual beneficiaries for direct feedback and expanding this base of beneficiaries or labharthi.
The word was introduced to the everyday political lexicon of the country by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP. Sometime around the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the BJP started the “labharthi” narrative, exploiting the world’s oldest division of “haves” and “have-nots” to unite the latter group, which has been historically numerically stronger beyond the divisions of caste, community, gender and religion.
