The central government, he said, will launch a “Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya New Teachers Training Programme” in Madhya Pradesh. Malviya was a senior leader of the pre-Independence Congress, but left the party over the creation of separate Hindu and Muslim electorates. He also founded the Hindu Mahasabha in 1906.

Madhya Pradesh, Jaitley said, will also house a Jayaprakash Narayan National Centre for Excellence in the Humanities. Narayan — better known as JP — was the architect of the non-violent rebellion against Indira Gandhi that led to India’s first non-Congress government in 1977. That government was a coalition of Narayan’s party, splinter groups of the Congress and the Jana Sangh — the precursor of the BJP.

The names of some schemes also reflect the BJP’s passion for Sanskrit.

The Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, launched by the UPA as its flagship programme to improve sanitation in villages, will now be called the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, with a target to ensure a clean toilet in every Indian home by 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.

The Ganga conservation mission will now be called Namami Gange — a salutation to the Ganga.

But the BJP’s preference for Sanskrit over Hindi and Hindi over English isn’t universal — not if the scheme refers to a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Jaitley’s predecessors under the UPA — P. Chidamabaram and Pranab Mukherjee — weren’t anywhere as fluent as him in Hindi. But in their budget speeches they made it a point to refer to the central government’s premier rural housing scheme as Indira Awas Yojana, named after Indira Gandhi.

For Jaitley yesterday, the yojana simply became the “rural housing scheme.”