Rights have been at the heart of the UPA government's policy agenda. But one right more than any other has defined its decade in power. Not the Right to Information. India's RTI Act is revolutionary, but similar laws exist in many countries.

No, the UPA's signature piece of rights-based legislation is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Nowhere else in the world has the state imposed on itself a requirement to provide citizens temporary jobs at the minimum wage. For all its shortcomings, MGNREGA represents an important step towards a meaningful social safety net.

But what will happen to MGNREGA if, as seems likely, the Congress-led government is ousted from power? The most probable post-election scenario is a BJP-led coalition, with Narendra Modi at its head. What will Modi do with MGNREGA?

No one really knows. Both the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate have maintained a studied ambiguity on MGNREGA since it first emerged as draft legislation in 2004. BJP MPs initially dismissed the idea as too costly, but later criticized the government for attempting to water down the original draft. (This was not unlike the BJP's approach to the National Food Security Bill: party leaders dismissed the idea as fiscally irresponsible, after which Modi himself wrote to Manmohan Singh to complain that it was insufficiently generous.)

Once MGNREGA was in force, the BJP relentlessly criticized it as the epitome of government waste, fraud, and abuse. Even so, it claimed to have implemented it effectively in the states it governed. The party managed to be both for and against MGNREGA at the same time.

This vagueness has persisted during the current campaign. The BJP manifesto has but a single cryptic sentence on MGNREGA, calling for the programme to be more closely linked to agriculture. This implies an intention to keep MGNREGA operating in some form, but without saying so directly, or indicating how this new emphasis might be realized.

Modi himself has been even less straightforward. His first substantive utterance on MGNREGA - at a March 2013 meeting of business leaders - consisted of empty rhetoric. Modi said that MGNREGA should have been conceived as a "development guarantee" programme, one based on service to the nation. It is hard to know what to make of such statements, though the corporate audience cheered Modi's equally evasive punch line - that India needed "actions" not more "acts". During this election campaign, Modi has frequently expressed his disgust with UPA schemes such as MGNREGA that offer mere "crumbs" to the poor. But he has also bragged about the superior efficiency with which the Gujarat has delivered MGNREGA work to job-seekers. While campaigning in Assam, he criticized the Congress-run state government for not enlisting enough workers into MGNREGA.

That Modi would refuse to articulate a clear policy on MGNREGA is another sign that issue-oriented "programmatic politics" is nowhere near displacing the identity-based "patronage politics" that has long dominated the Indian electoral landscape. It is also smart tactics. Why alienate either those who have benefited from MGNREGA - including the bureaucrats and politicians who steal from it - or those who regard the programme as a symbol of political malaise?

Were Modi not so often praised as a politician with a difference - one whose forthrightness is considered central to his appeal - none of this would be worthy of comment. But because Modi and the BJP are at such pains to emphasize their commitment to transparency, the opacity of their plans for MGNREGA is deeply troubling.

Modi is unlikely to kill off MGNREGA outright. Indeed, the employment guarantee was designed as a legislative Act precisely to make it more difficult for a future government to reverse. Another Act of Parliament would be needed to repeal MGNREGA - something that might attract the wrong kind of attention for a Modi government attempting to push through the pro-business measures it has promised, though (again) not specified. Instead, Modi will almost certainly rely on administrative gimmicks to starve MGNREGA until it reaches something like a persistent vegetative state.

In fact, his record in Gujarat shows that a Modi-led government in Delhi will resort to the same "reform by stealth" techniques that served PV Narasimha Rao so well during the earlier years of economic liberalization. Business writers such as R Jagannathan have even spelled out the legerdemain that Modi should engage in to restore fiscal "discipline": first, reduce agricultural input subsidies; then mitigate the political backlash by raising support prices; and when this inflates the food-subsidy bill, pass the cost, and the political fallout, onto the states.

MGNREGA will get the same treatment. When AAP says that Congress and BJP are two sides of the same coin, it is this kind of politics they have in mind.

The writer is professor of Political Science, Hunter College, City University of New York