Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will strongly counter the Opposition’s charges of presenting a ‘two-states budget’ when she replies to the debate on the budget next week in both houses of Parliament, sources told News18. Ahead of key state elections in a few months, the BJP is keen to bust the Opposition’s narrative.
The minister, in her detailed reply, could list out how the Narendra Modi government has catered to all states, both in the vote-for-account this February and in the Union Budget, aside other projects. Some key NDA allies have in fact reached out to the FM to do so in her reply.
“I have told the finance minister that she should come out with all the facts in her reply so that automatically all this speculation and wrong publicity being done by opposition parties and Congress stops,” NDA ally Praful Patel told News18. He cited how the prime minister was in Mumbai recently and said poll-bound Maharashtra had received a bounty from the Centre, including the Rs 76,000 crore-worth port in Wadhvan in western coast which is fully funded by the Union government.
Government sources said the funds for Andhra Pradesh and Bihar were because commitments had to be fulfilled to the former since the bifurcation of the state, while Bihar was a case of long neglect and is ravaged by Kosi river floods every year.
“But that does not mean that other states have been ignored. Every state gets a pie from the capital expenditure of Rs 11 lakh crore announced in the budget as well as the interest-free loan to states for the next 50 years. The new houses to be built under PM Awas Yojana are for all states. Income tax relief to people under new tax regime is across India… the new employment incentive scheme announced for over four crore youth in the budget is also pan-India. The finance minister will be explaining it all in her reply in both houses,” a senior minister in the government told News18.
Opposition Smells Blood in Poll-bound States
The Opposition is smelling blood in the poll-bound states, with leaders repeatedly highlighting how the states of Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi and Jharkhand “got nothing” in the budget. AAP leader Raghav Chadha told News18 that both Delhi and Punjab had got nothing in the budget though people gave all seven seats of Delhi to the BJP in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
“We understand that the government had to give something to Andhra Pradesh and Bihar as the government is surviving on their support. But what harm has Delhi done to them? It is step-motherly treatment…this budget has achieved a remarkable feat of displeasing every section of society,” Chadha told News18.
Opposition leaders from Maharashtra and Haryana are also turning the heat on the government. “Haryana did not even find a mention in the budget…there is complete regional imbalance in the budget. If the Union government has forgotten Haryana today, Haryana’s people are going to forget about voting for BJP two months later,” Congress MP from the state, Deepender Hooda, told News18.
Priyanka Chaturvedi and Sanjay Raut of Shiv Sena (UBT) also took on the government for ignoring the case of a big state like Maharashtra in the Union Budget “only because the state had not voted for the NDA in the Lok Sabha elections”.
The Opposition is now trying to put the BJP on the back foot in key election states of Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Haryana and Delhi. To bolster its attack, the Congress chose Kumari Selja from Haryana and Praniti Shinde from Maharashtra deliberately as its opening speakers in the Lok Sabha on the debate to corner the government.
BJP Strategy
Speaking briefly in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday in response to the speech of Leader of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge, Sitharaman said it was an “outrageous allegation” that only two states had been favored in the budget. She said that just because some states had not found a mention in the budget speech did not mean that they had got nothing in the Union Budget.
Other BJP speakers in the ongoing debate have also been asked to counter the Opposition’s narrative, citing the hypocrisy in how the Congress in the past had been slamming BJP for not doing anything on ‘special status’ for Andhra Pradesh and Bihar but was now criticising the government for giving assistance in the budget.
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