The first week of the Budget Session of Parliament has once again revealed the deep disdain the current ruling dispensation has for the people and their concerns, needs and rights. The session began amidst countrywide protests against the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula and the subsequent police crackdown in JNU, the arrests and interrogation of JNU students on charges of ‘sedition’ and the concerted RSS-BJP assault on JNU students, teachers and other citizens defending JNU and democracy. But we could trust the Modi government to keep conspicuously silent about all this and the President’s inaugural address to the joint session of Parliament has done precisely that.
The arrogance of the government found its most loud melodramatic expression in the speech of HRD minister Smriti Irani. Already in the dock on the Rohith Vemula issue, Smriti Irani could only weave a web of brazen lies in a vain attempt to project herself as a victim of a conspiracy, her lies being quickly nailed by Rohith’s mother Radhika Vemula and the doctor who first checked Rohith soon after his death. In a brazen attempt to divert attention from her role in the Hyderabad episode, she started reading out from alleged leaflets circulated in JNU on the mythology of Durga and Mahishasur, trying to project JNU students not only as ‘anti-national’ but also as anti-Hindu. It did not matter to her that in India’s pluralist tradition Mahishasur is also seen as a martyr in many regions and by many groups, especially among adivasis and dalits and her own party MP from Delhi, Udit Raj has been associated with the Mahishasur celebration in JNU.
While the government continued with its paranoid demonization of JNU and declared a virtual war on the JNU community, the Home Minister even trying to discover a Pakistan connection and terrorist links with the JNU incident, in BJP-ruled Haryana the Jat reservation agitation was allowed to go berserk, indulging in indiscriminate acts of arson and even horrific crimes like gang rapes. The government which swooped down on JNU students with astonishing alacrity, remained a mute spectator even as Haryana was ravaged and RSS goons attacked Kanhaiya Kumar and journalists, teachers and activists right in the premises of the Patiala House court. And the Prime Minister only amplified this paranoia by invoking the bogey of destabilisation which has been notoriously used in the past to clamp down Emergency and inflict a blanket suspension of constitutional liberties and rights.
Ever since coming to power with the grand rhetoric of ‘achchhe din’, the Modi government either claims to be a victim of the past or continues to conjure visions of a rosy future even as the present is overshadowed by a growing all-round crisis. The pattern has been evident once again in this year’s railway and general budgets. The government shamelessly claimed credit for not raising fares in the railway budget even as it announced several pre-budget increases in fare, drastically raised the cancellation fee and abolished the fare concession hitherto available to children in the 5-11 age group. And let us not forget that this huge burden has been thrust on passengers amidst a significant drop in global oil prices. The railway ministry remains mired in its elitist obsession with ‘bullet trains’ and other high-speed train services while ignoring the questions of improving basic amenities for ordinary passengers, ensuring railway safety and expanding railway routes and train services in backward and remote regions.
The general budget presented by Arun Jaitley provided yet another statement of the government’s failure and betrayal on the economic front. Having painted the Indian economy in rosy colours in last year’s economic survey – the economy was said to have reached a ‘sweet spot’ where double-digit growth was just round the corner – the government now has to deal with the reality of a falling growth rate and acute crisis in the two crucial sectors of agriculture and banking. In his budget speech, Jaitley blamed ‘an unsupportive global environment, adverse weather conditions and obstructive political atmosphere’ for the economic decline. BJP propagandists are describing this year’s budget as being ‘farmer-friendly’, but the fact is all that farmers have got in this budget is a vague promise of doubling agricultural income by 2022 and a moderately increased allocation for irrigation without any immediate relief to face the impact of widespread drought, crop failure, credit crunch, unremunerative prices and unresponsive procurement mechanism. If anything, the budget has added a huge insult to India’s deeply injured farmers.
The budget said nothing about the non-implementation of the Food Security Act even three years after enactment and made false claims about making the highest allocation for MNREGA even as it fell way short of the 2011-12 level in terms of real prices. The government is now deafeningly silent on its 2014 election claim of repatriation of black money; instead it announced yet another amnesty scheme for people with unaccounted income and wealth. The habitual tax thieves and loan defaulters got a big nod with the announcement of the corporate-friendly dispute resolution mechanism which will effectively abolish all corporate liability for unpaid taxes in lieu of some token payment. Having pushed public sector banks into a huge crisis by forcing them to extend massive loans to corporate houses and then write off the accumulated dues, the government is now pushing for increasing privatisation of the banking sector as has been made apparent by the decision to lower the government’s stakes in IDBI from the current level of more than 80 percent to less than 51 percent.
The tax policy in India is among the most regressive in the world with a low tax-to-GDP ratio coupled with a huge reliance on indirect taxes hitting the common people. By further increasing the burden of service tax while leaving corporate taxes unchanged, this year’s budget has only reinforced the regressive nature of India’s revenue structure. The government has pocketed the lion’s share of the gains accruing from the drop in oil prices by increasing duties and now with added across-the-board cess on the purchase of almost all goods and services, the government has passed on the entire burden of its economic failures and the impunity enjoyed by the super rich for its routine violation of almost every law of the land on the shoulders of the poor and the middle classes. It is this vast majority of the people who fund the budget (by paying taxes and duties and also responding to the government’s appeal to give up subsidies), yet it is they who bear all the burden and remain permanently at the receiving end.
The budget session began with powerful protests outside Parliament by students and peasants and adivasis. With the government refusing to address the immediate needs and demands of the people, the protests must now get louder against the callous and repressive Modi regime.
