Socialist leader Jai Prakash Narayan addressing a meeting organized by the Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal in Bombay (now Mumbai) on March 3, 1969. (TOI file photo)

BJP president Amit Shah paying tributes to Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay on the occasion of 98th birth anniversary in New Delhi, on September 25, 2014. (PTI photo)

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the much-touted model village scheme on the birth anniversary of Jai Prakash Narayan on Saturday, putting the Congress bugbear on policy firmament that, on the back of an overdrive to rename schemes bearing Congress icons, is sure to rile the rival outfit.Modi heaped praises on JP who led an agitation against the Indira Gandhi regime that clamped emergency, clubbing him with Mahatma Gandhi as one of the foremost thinkers of the last century and calling him the champion of rural development. The dedication of " Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana " to JP, to a packed house of MPs and panchayat representatives from states, marked a political statement.Modi underlined it was also the birth anniversary of Nanaji Deshmukh, an RSS icon associated with rural uplift.A few MPs from Congress and other opposition parties did attend the function along with a strong BJP contingent and RD minister Nitin Gadkari and his deputy Upendra Kushwaha.For Congress, JP has been a touchy subject. In 2010, a party spokesman, now AICC general secretary, Mohan Prakash came under strong attack after he compared Rahul Gandhi to JP as the youth icon. Prakash had to clarify his remarks in the face of accusations that he had glorified Indira’s nemesis.The launch could have been another innocuous BJP desire to toast the author of “JP aandolan” in which most of the party leaders cut their political teeth. This aggressive championing of JP hides another nuance of anti-Congress politics. While socialists and RSS in 1977, their bitter split left them to claim the JP legacy .Seen in conjunction with the renaming of rural schemes named after Congress icons, it is viewed as another attempt to needle the Grand Old Party.The Modi government has rechristened Indira Awas Yojana, Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission and Rajiv Awas Yojana while skill development and livelihood missions have been named after another Sangh stalwart Deen Dayal Upadhyay.According to the new scheme, every MP would choose a village to be developed through government schemes and local initiative. With a tinge of humour, Modi told the MPs: “Adopt a village, but make sure it is not yours or your in-law's.”Modi said the novel aspect of the scheme is that it would look beyond government programmes. Saying that every state has 5-10 villages that are models of development, he argued, “If government schemes were to develop villages, others too should have developed. But only these few have. It means there is something beyond government schemes.”He said he had taken a risk in the scheme that would make MPs and villages demand development from the state machinery as it would expose the failings of the system.The PM said he would soon choose a village in his constituency, Varanasi, for development and urged MPs to finish the process fast so that the scheme could get rolling.