An early Budget for Elections 2019

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, given his penchant for abbreviations, might have liked to put it as the new ‘GPS’ or guiding principle of his government in preparation for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. It looks as if the Modi government has initiated its re-election strategy a couple of years early with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s budget speech promising Gas (LPG cylinders to below poverty line families), Power (to all un-electrified villages) and Sadak (road connectivity to all villages) by 2018-19.

Indications that the Modi government was preparing a leftward shift were in evidence for nearly a year, or at least ever since early 2015 when Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi famously termed it a ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’.

In April 2015, with his government barely a year in office and his party recovering from the thrashing it had received in the Delhi assembly polls, Prime Minister Modi told the Bharaiya Janata Party (BJP) National Executive in Bengaluru that henceforth the guiding principle of his government is going to be ‘Antyodaya’. It took the debacle in Bihar in November of that year for everyone else in the party to wake up to the import of the PM’s advice.

Since then, the PM and his ministers have announced one scheme after another for the country’s farmers and for rural areas. ‘Antyodaya’ is Sanskrit for ensuring the progress of the last man in the queue and its coinage is credited to Bharatiya Jan Sangh founder Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. Not that Modi himself is a fan of the term, having told the party on one occasion how he had used easier to understand terms like ‘Garib Kalyan’ or ‘welfare of the poor’ during his years as the chief minister of Gujarat.

Today, Jaitley’s budget had little for the middle classes, but much in terms of announcements for the rural areas. Reeling from the criticism that it has faced after the suicide of Hyderabad Central University Dalit PhD scholar Rohith Vemula and with the crucial Uttar Pradesh assembly polls barely year away, Jaitley also had several announcements for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes of the country. “What about Rohith Vemula?” piped in an Opposition member as Jaitley rattled out schemes for Dalits.

The three ministers whose performance Jaitley extolled during his nearly a 100-minute long speech were also those handling infrastructure sectors with their focus on providing power, road connectivity and railway network to the poorest. These were surface transport and roads minister Nitin Gadkari, power minister Piyush Goyal and Railway minister Suresh Prabhu.

However, government sources said the Budget has also paid attention to providing tax breaks to BJP’s core support base of professionals, traders and shopkeepers, the youth as well as lower middle classes. “It is an anti-chartered accountant Budget. And if you sit down to calculate, the tax breaks to the middle classes by way of relaxations in House Rent Allowance (HRA) breaks are significant,” a minister said.

The Budget, this government’s third, seems to suggest that the government is preparing for a series of assembly elections in the next three years, culminating with the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Elections are due in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry and Assam by April this year. By March next year, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab would vote to elect new assemblies. Later that year, Gujarat will go to polls and the year after that it will be the turn of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.