Brakes of economy have fallen off but govt's horn keeps getting louder: Tharoor

Asserting that the Union Budget in many ways is emblematic of the government’s “economic mismanagement and financial recklessness”, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday said the brakes of the Indian economy have fallen off but this government’s horn keeps getting louder.

Participating in the general discussion on the Budget in the Lok Sabha, Tharoor also took a swipe at the BJP over the renaming of Ayushman wellness centres as Ayushman Arogya Mandirs, saying a certain constituency in Uttar Pradesh should have taught the BJP never again to “exploit a mandir for scoring political goals”.

“This underwhelming Budget is a woefully missed opportunity. After all, this was the government’s chance to prove to the citizens that after the colossal setback the BJP suffered in the recently concluded general election, the finance minister (Nirmala Sitharaman) and the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) have actually listened to the people of the country.

“But once again they have let the people of India down,” the Thiruvananthapuram MP said.

“The Budget in many ways is an emblem of this government’s economic mismanagement and financial recklessness made all the more worse by its divisive policies,” Tharoor said.

The Congress leader said that when it comes to sectors as indispensable as public healthcare, the mantra of the BJP as with everything else has been to “rebrand and not revamp”.

“Honestly, hearing the inflated claims of the ruling party after this week’s Budget and all the TV shows I had to appear on yesterday, I am reminded of a garage mechanic saying to the owner of a car, ‘hum aapke brakes toh theek nahi kar sake, is liye horn ki aawaaz ko badha diya hai’ (I could not repair your car’s brakes but I have turned up the volume of the horn),” he said.

“That is what the government is doing. The brakes of the Indian economy have fallen off but this government’s horn keeps getting louder,” he said.

“This government thinks that rhetoric is a substitute for action,” the Congress leader said.

The priorities of the BJP chiefly revolve around appeasing its two regional allies, forgetting that there are 26 other states and eight Union territories whose people have nothing to be happy about, Tharoor said, in an apparent reference to the JD(U) from Bihar and the TDP from Andhra Pradesh.

Tharoor pointed out that the people of Andhra Pradesh have less reason to be happy at the supposed allocations made to them in the Budget.

“The Budget only commits to arranging Rs 15,000 crore towards the development of Amaravati. This is not an allocation. It merely entails the facilitation of loans by the Centre from multilateral development organisations to your state instead of amounting to formal financial support from the Centre,” he argued.

This commitment will only add to Andhra’s debt burden, he added.

Four other NDA-rules states — Bihar, Assam, Sikkim and Uttarakhand — have received support for natural calamities, he said. On the other hand, the INDIA bloc-ruled states find themselves cast out and ignored, Tharoor said.

“Indeed Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and my home state of Kerala have time and again asked for funds in the wake of natural calamities such as cyclones to rapid coastal erosions and they have gotten none,” he said.

Bihar received Rs 26,000 crore for its highways but Karnataka got nothing for critical road infrastructure projects in Bengaluru, Tharoor said.

For the government of India, it seems some states are more equal than others, he said.