When Arun Shourie, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supporter-turned-critic, awarded the “Congress + Cow” epitaph to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he would not have known that this zinger would end up defining succinctly the saffron party for a majority of its die-hard opponents. Even the party’s supporters who get frustrated with its ways every now and then employ this phrase to lash at the party even if they don’t really believe in it.

“Suit boot ki sarkar” is the only other one-liner – a false charge of equal proportion if not more – that has caught the imagination of this government’s baiters with such intense fervour. In a way, this forced Prime Minister Modi to pivot and completely transform his image from a ‘pro-business’ chief executive officer of the country to a ‘pro-poor’ pradhan sevak.

When looked closely, the “Congress + Cow” claim doesn’t hold water. And the likes of Shourie and Yashwant Sinha can’t put their finger on initiatives taken by Vajpayee and not pursued by the current ruling dispensation. Road construction in general and the golden quadrilateral in particular are what Vajpayee is most remembered for on the domestic policy front, apart from disinvestment and privatisation. On both these accounts, Modi is running up the score on Vajpayee. This year’s disinvestment target is the highest ever, and the government is well on its way to meet it. Privatisation of Air India will be much bigger than any other privatisation initiative of National Democratic Alliance-1.

On 25 October, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced an ambitious Rs 6.92 lakh crore outlay for construction and upgradation of India’s roads network – the biggest ever undertaking on this front since Vajpayee’s golden quadrilateral (GQ) and Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY).

The Vajpayee government’s achievements in this area were impressive so much so that even the United Progressive Alliance government in 2013, in an affidavit in the Supreme Court, accepted that the NDA regime built nearly 50 per cent of the total national highways laid in the last 32 years. According to IndiaSpend, the NDA added 15,984km of national highways to the total network in just five years, while the UPA could construct only 13,674km in its nine years of rule. The Modi government has again put road construction on priority after coming to power. In the last three years of the UPA, 81,095km of rural roads were built, while in the first three years after that, the Modi government has built 120,233km.

The Modi government’s goal – to build and upgrade 83,677km of roads in the next five years – if completed, will make Vajpayee’s achievement pale in comparison. It will increase total corridors from the current six (four GQ, North-South, East-West) to 50. Currently, 40 per cent freight is carried on national highways, which will rise to 70-80 per cent. Presently, only 300 districts are connected via four (or more) lane highways. Under Bharatmala, the number of connected districts will cross 550.

This corridor-based road development was started under prime minister Vajpayee’s visionary National Highways Development programme, which resulted in two of India’s best infrastructure achievements – golden quadrilateral connecting India’s four biggest metropolitan areas at the time and the North-South and East-West corridors connecting the far ends of the country. However, after the Vajpayee government demitted office, the N-S, E-W corridor also lost momentum. Instead of developing the corridor as a whole, small-stretch projects were taken up and lot of anomalies crept in where some parts of the corridor were four-laned while others remained two-laned, as evident in the picture below.