Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s Budget speech was “the most capitalist speech ever read by a Finance Minister” and did “nothing” to deal with challenges like unemployment, loss of household incomes, per capita expenditure and inflation, said former Finance Minister P. Chidambaran on Tuesday.
Also read: India Union Budget 2022: Political reactions
Parliament may vote the Budget because of the ruling party’s “brute majority” in the Lok Sabha but the “people will reject this capitalist Budget”, said Mr. Chidambaram, while articulating the Congress party’s stance at a press conference. Chief spokesperson of the Congress Randeep Singh Surjewala was also present at the press meet.
The former Finance Minister also claimed that the BJP is going to the Assembly elections to five States not on the basis of performance but on the calculation of “dividing the society into Hindus and non-Hindus and capture the bulk of the Hindu votes”.
Separately, in a tweet, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi described the Budget as a “zero sum Budget”. “M0di G0vernment’s Zer0 Sum Budget! Nothing for Salaried class, Middle class, The poor & deprived, Youth, Farmers, MSMEs (sic),” tweeted Mr. Gandhi. He placed zero in place of ‘o’ in the message to stress his point.
Also read: Budget has no vision for employment generation: Opposition
Offering a detailed response to the Budget speech, Mr. Chidambaram listed out the challenges that needed to be tackled: high rate of unemployment and job losses, closure of approximately 6 million MSMEs, loss of incomes for 84% households in the last two years, an estimated 4.6 crore people being pushed into abject poverty, loss of learning for students in rural India, malnutrition and India’s slide in the Global Hunger Index.
He claimed the cumulative wealth of 142 people in the country has increased from ₹23 lakh crore to ₹53 lakh crore in the last two years.
Watch | Highlights of Union Budget 2022-23
“After the Budget was presented this morning, we asked ourselves what has the Budget done to address any of these grave challenges. The blunt answer is nothing,” the former Finance Minister said.
“The Finance Minister has mastered the jargon of capitalist economics… The word poor occurs twice in paragraph 6, and we thank the Finance Minister for remembering that there are poor people in this country,” he added.
The veteran Congress leader said he was astonished that Ms. Sitharaman planned for the next 25 years and referred to it as “Amrit Kaal”, but didn’t pay any attention to the present needs.
He said there was not a word about any cash assistance for those who had been pushed to extreme poverty or lost their jobs, nothing about creating jobs for those whose education stopped at some stage at the school level, no revival plans for MSMEs.
