A fifteenth-century Bhakti saint's dream of a kingdom where no one goes hungry — and a twenty-first-century welfare programme that, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath argues, has finally made that dream real. On Wednesday, 29 July 2026, CM Yogi posted a verse by Sant Shiromani Ravidas Ji Maharaj on X, then credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi with translating those centuries-old ideals into ground-level action. The verse CM Yogi quoted — 'Aisa chahun raj main, jahan mile saban ko ann. Chhot-bado sab sam base, Ravidas rahe prasann' — translates as: 'I desire such a kingdom where everyone receives food. Where the small and the great live as equals, and Ravidas remains content.' It is among the most cited couplets from the Ravidas canon, invoked across generations as a compact manifesto for social equality and food justice.

The Saint Behind the Verse

Sant Ravidas, born in Varanasi in the fifteenth century, was a central figure of the Bhakti movement whose compositions appear in the Guru Granth Sahib. His philosophy of radical equality — cutting across caste lines and centred on access to basic sustenance — has made him a touchstone for Dalit communities across Uttar Pradesh and beyond. Invoking his words is never merely literary; it is a political and social signal aimed squarely at communities that have historically faced exclusion.

Modi's Welfare Record as the Fulfilment of an Ideal

CM Yogi's framing positions the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) — the central government's flagship free-foodgrain scheme launched in 2020 and extended repeatedly since — as the concrete answer to Ravidas's six-hundred-year-old aspiration. The scheme provides free foodgrains to priority households across India, covering hundreds of millions of beneficiaries. By threading a medieval saint's verse directly into a present-day welfare narrative, the post does something BJP communications have refined into a pattern: it roots contemporary policy in a moral and spiritual lineage that predates the party itself.

A Recurring BJP Playbook in UP

This is not an isolated gesture. BJP governments in Uttar Pradesh have consistently invoked Bhakti-era saints — Kabir, Tulsidas, and Ravidas chief among them — to frame welfare measures as the historical fulfilment of egalitarian spiritual ideals. The approach serves a dual purpose: it honours a saint revered intensely by Dalit communities, a politically significant constituency in UP, and it simultaneously elevates the party's welfare record into something that feels less like policy and more like destiny. The post carries no exclamation of a new scheme or event — it is a tribute, a framing, a moral argument compressed into a couplet and a credit line. But in UP's political grammar, that is often enough. When a Chief Minister quotes Ravidas to praise the Prime Minister, the audience knows exactly what is being said — and to whom. Six centuries after Ravidas wrote his vision of a hunger-free kingdom, the debate over whether that kingdom has arrived is very much alive.