The Opposition slammed the Union Budget calling it an exercise in political jugglery to appease the BJP’s two key allies, Janata Dal (United) and Telugu Desam Party, while doing little to address issues such as high rate of unemployment and inflation. States ruled by non-National Democratic Alliance (NDA) parties, the Opposition said, have been ignored.
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The DMK and Congress have decided to protest against the “discriminatory” Budget. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin and the three Congress Chief Ministers, Karnataka’s Siddaramaiah, Telangana’s Revanth Reddy and Himachal Pradesh’s Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu will skip the Governing Council meeting of NITI Aayog on Saturday. The decision was taken at a meeting of the INDIA bloc on Tuesday evening. Trinamool Congress president and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee will attend the NITI Aayog meeting to air the State’s grievances.
The Congress, which claimed that the internship programme announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was modelled on the “apprenticeship” scheme in their 2024 election manifesto, called it a copycat Budget.
In a post in Hindi on X, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge said, “The Modi government’s ‘copycat budget’ could not even copy the Congress’ Nyay Patra properly! The Modi government’s budget is distributing half-hearted ‘rewadis (freebies)‘ to dupe its coalition partners so that the NDA survives.”
“This is not a budget for the ‘progress of the country’, it is a ‘save Modi government’ budget!” he said.
Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi dismissed the Budget as an exercise to save the government. He said it sought to “appease allies” by making “hollow promises” to them at the cost of other States.
Addressing a press conference later in the day, former Finance Minister and Rajya Sabha MP P. Chidambaram said unemployment is the “biggest challenge facing the country” and the government’s efforts are “too little and will have only little impact on the grave situation”.
Mr. Chidambaram also said that nothing in the Budget speech “gives us the confidence that the government will seriously tackle the issue of inflation”.
The government, he alleged, also seems to be “blissfully ignorant” of its own statistics that wages have stagnated in the last six years. Demanding the scrapping of the short-term military recruitment scheme Agnipath, he said several political parties, including the Congress, have demanded that the scheme be scrapped forthwith. However, there is no response from the government, Mr. Chidambaram said.
Trinamool Congress’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee termed the Budget a “complete failure with zero warranty”. “Instead of tackling urgent issues like unemployment, rising prices and growing inflation, the BJP has crafted a budget to bribe its coalition partners and buy time before the government implodes,” he posted on X.
The Communist Party Of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau said the Budget should have focused on expanding economic activities, but instead its proposals are “contractionary and regressive”. This will only impose further miseries on the people and depress the levels of investment and employment generation. “The Budget figures show that the revenue earnings of the government increased by 14.5% while the expenditures grew only by 5.94%. Instead of using these revenues for expanding economic activity, it has been used to reduce the fiscal deficit, to appease International Finance Capital, from 5.8% to 4.9% of the GDP,” the Polit Bureau stated. The party also called the government’s Employment-Linked Incentive a ruse to subsidise the corporates.
CPI general secretary D. Raja termed the Budget a “deceitful exercise in hiding the failures of the last 10 years of BJP-rule”. “PM Modi promised 2 crore jobs per year a decade ago. That should have totalled 20 crore jobs till now but Budget 2024-25 has come up with new Jumlas on skilling 20 lakh youth in five years and giving internship opportunities to 1 crore youth in five years,” he said.
