FM's Budget reply was feisty, but most Oppn queries went unanswered

Replying to the discussion on the Union Budget in the Lok Sabha, on Tuesday (July 30), Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman gave a combative political rebuttal to the criticisms of the fiscal statement without addressing any of the core concerns raised on specific issues by the Opposition. Instead, the finance minister asserted that the criticisms triggered by her seventh Union Budget were the result of a “huge conspiracy” to “divide the country” and “spread negativity against business and wealth creators”.

In her over an hour-long response to the discussion in the Lower House of Parliament, the finance minister made outlandish assertions about India’s employment rate improving, inflation being well under control, booming agriculture and massive devolution of funds from the Centre to the states. Any problems facing the country’s economy today, the finance minister claimed, as has been the praxis of the Narendra Modi government over the past decade, were the result of legacy challenges left behind by Congress-led regimes of the past.

Large doles to AP, Bihar

Through the course of the past week, sundry Opposition members had slammed Sitharaman’s Budget for largely being an exercise to ensure the stability of the Modi regime by allocating huge central funds and projects to Bihar and Andhra Pradesh; states ruled by crucial BJP allies Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu, respectively. The Opposition had dubbed the large doles to Bihar and Andhra and the lack of any mention in the budget of what the Centre wished to grant other states as an assault on cooperative federalism.

Opposition leaders had also pointedly asked the finance minister to explain the viability and rationale behind her budgetary announcements with regard to the new schemes for employment generation, the increase in short and long term capital gains, inflation management, et al. Likewise, the Opposition has also questioned her deafening silence on the issue of granting a legal guarantee for MSP to farmers, conducting a caste-based census, the controversial Agniveer scheme and the reduction in the percentage of funds allocated under various key heads, including agriculture, welfare of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, education, urban development and schemes for women.

As she responded to the discussion on Tuesday, Sitharaman’s uniform response to each of these assertions by the Opposition was that they had either misconstrued the Budget statement or were simply misleading the country by distorting facts.

No clear answer to Opposition's queries

Sitharaman rightly pointed out that no budget of the past, presented by dispensations ruled by any political party, made a mention of every Indian state and that “because the budget speech doesn’t mention a state, it doesn’t mean that the state would not be given any share in central funds and projects”. However, if the Opposition had hoped that the finance minister would also buttress her feisty rebuttal with elaborate explanations on what the Centre planned to give to various states, they were left disappointed.

Barring a handful of infrastructure projects meant for states such as Kerala, Telangana, Himachal Pradesh and Bengal, Sitharaman did not divulge any new details about what different Indian states could expect from the Centre in the ongoing financial year.

Like on most other issues, the finance minister blamed previous Congress regimes for not giving a legal guarantee for MSP; asserting that the UPA government of Dr Manmohan Singh had even “rejected the MS Swaminathan committee’s report” that had recommended a new formula for calculation of the minimum support price for various crops.

On the criticism by Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi regarding the abysmally poor number of officers from the scheduled caste, scheduled tribe and backward communities in various administrative services, Sitharaman once again referred to wily acknowledged failures – even by Congress’s own leaders, including Rahul – of past governments led by Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi in apportioning a quota for backward castes.

“If you had given them a quota (in the services) then, they would have been in senior positions today,” the finance minister said, even as she slammed Rahul for “disrespecting the halwa ceremony” that precedes the final drafting of the Union Budget each year. Asserting that “charity begins at home”, the finance minister also asked Rahul to explain why the board of trustees of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust, which have nine and five members respectively, had no representative from the SC, ST and OBC communities.

Rejects other charges as well

Sitharaman also rejected all criticism by the Opposition over growing poverty and hunger in the country, asserting that she “cannot believe in flawed indicators” relied upon by the Global Hunger Index (India’s rank in the GHI has been steadily slipping for the past decade) and wondered, rhetorically of course, “how are conflict-ridden nations, African nations being ranked above India when we are giving free rations to 80 crore people... how can they say Indians are going hungry”.

The finance minister offered no reply on the growing incidents of railway accidents, her decision to impose higher tax on LTCG transactions while doing away with indexation or on how she planned to fulfil the projected targets of job creation.

With the Opposition loudly interrupting her speech with demands for clear answers to their specific questions, the finance minister claimed the Indian economy, Armed Forces and the country’s parliamentary conventions as well as social fabric were all “under severe attack” and that the Opposition, in cahoots with other forces, was trying to create “mistrust in the society through fallacies”.

Sitharaman said the political situation in India today, as result of “this huge nexus of a conspiracy” had become such that “even a spark will create a massive conflict”. She alluded to the Opposition’s criticism of the Agniveer scheme as a ploy to “divide the Army and its soldiers”. On the INDIA bloc’s other key attack at the Modi government; that of patronising select capitalists like Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, the finance minister said “entrepreneurship is being villainised” and “negativity is being spread against business and wealth creators”.