Budget Signals BJP's Concerns About the Alliance and the Upcoming Elections

Nirmala Sitharaman sought to shut all the exit doors for Bihar CM Nitish Kumar from the NDA.

The Budget speech is invariably hard statistics served in ornamental prose. Finance ministers have often borrowed couplets in the past to add levity to harsh words. Union Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman presented the 2024 Budget in the Lok Sabha, showing no interest in poetry of any sort.

Sitharaman came straight to the point as she un-layered the Bihar package in the Budget. After a while, it seemed that she had concluded that Bihar alone could deliver a ‘Viksit Bharat by 2047.’ She reminisced about the old days, about the Union Ministers of Railways who hailed from Bihar and often packed the Rail Budgets with details of new trains and projects for Bihar.

BJP’s Nitish Kumar Dread

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has left the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on quite a few occasions and has repeatedly sworn that he would never do so again. He has reiterated his vow not to leave the NDA again in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his campaign trail during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Sitharaman sought to shut all the exit doors for the Bihar CM from the NDA. The elevation of any new states to a special category status is no longer possible, said the government ahead of the unveiling of the Budget.

The prime minister’s lifejacket comprises two chief ministers—Nitish Kumar and N Chandra Babu Naidu. Ironically, Both had left the NDA in the past and became bitter Modi critics.

The Bihar CM is battling a sharp erosion of his political image. While the floods cause strife in his home state, deteriorating law and order situations are testing his administrative skills.

Nitish is gearing up for the Bihar Assembly elections next year. Bihar will also be a big test for the BJP. The JD(U) and the BJP will seek to stay on the ruling side. Sitharaman has delivered a script for both the JD(U) and the BJP to hold on to the Bihar turf.

‘Bihari Budget’: A Charm Offensive

Two expressways – Patna to Purnia and Buxar to Bhagalpur – will be music to the ears of the people of Bihar. Thousands of people end up making the arduous 16-hour journey from Delhi to Bihar by bus.

An industrial node in Gaya on the Amritsar-Kolkata industrial corridor will be akin to rains during a drought, for Bihar hardly has any industry to talk about after Jamshedpur and Jasidih went to Jharkhand following the bifurcation of the state.

The icing on the cake will be a proposed power plant in Pirpainti in the Bhagalpur district and a proposal for the Kashi Vishwanath model of redevelopment for the most sought-after temples in Bodh Gaya and Rajgir along with tourism development in Nalanda on an international scale.

Before the Bihar chief minister could have said ‘ye dil mange more’, Sitharaman also announced Rs 11500 crore in financial support for irrigation and flood mitigation projects. Modi can now believe that he has securely buried any resentment from Kumar, and cemented his place ahead of the upcoming elections.

The special package for Bihar, quantitively and qualitatively, overshadowed the proposals for Andhra Pradesh. Unlike the JD(U), the TDP did not demand special category status at the all-party meeting ahead of the parliament session.

The BJP senses that Naidu would give them a long rope because he has to build the capital of Andhra Pradesh in Amravati with Modi’s support.

The BJP is bracing for the Assembly elections in Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and Haryana. The polls to be held later this year are already making BJP strategists sweat. The unemployment issue is threatening to derail the BJP’s poll campaigns in three states.

The BJP faced stunning blows to their ambitious targets in the Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan. A stock-taking exercise blamed the unemployment crisis for grounding the BJP’s electoral juggernaut.

Modi Seeks Youth Connect

The urgency to create jobs is revealed in the ruling dispensation. Sitharaman unveiled the Prime Minister’s Employment Linked Incentive Scheme that targets the creation of 2.90 crore jobs, besides internships, for one crore youth.

In a post-budget pressor, Union Minister for Railways Ashwini Viashnaw mentioned that the exercise to fill 40,000 vacancies in the national transporter is underway. Sitharaman’s proposal to offer Rs 1.50 lakh crore interest-free support to states for 50 years along with Rs 11.11 lakh crore infrastructure budget aims to pump prime the economy to push employment generation.     

Sitharaman glossed over ‘big plans’ in infrastructure with just one mention of “railroad” spending in her budget speech, as she was mindful that she would merely repeat the proposals made in the interim budget and past Budget speeches. The PMGSY phase IV exemplifies the repackaging of old plans in the Budget.

Vaishnaw admitted in his post-budget presser that the Budget allocation for Railways covers the already announced proposals to manufacture 2,500 general coaches this year and another 10,000 afterwards. The same goes for rural and urban housing, solar power schemes, and others.

Political expediency most often drives the economy, and Sitharaman made it crystal clear that Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, and the youth were the three legs of the Union Budget. The promise to address the issue of the new pension scheme soon underlined that the BJP is giving importance to the weight of the electoral expediency as babus pose no immediate threat.

(The author is a senior Delhi-based journalist. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)