What does the 2023-24 budget mean for the BJP in fighting the coming polls, including the nine in 2023, and the one in 2024? A simple question, with a simple answer: Budget 2023-24 has been drafted as a saviour! The BJP wants to win as many of the nine assembly elections as possible and a third consecutive Modi term. Budget 2023, therefore, had to change the perception, check all the right boxes. The Modi-friendly media was all Lady Gaga, so to speak. One panellist gave Budget 2023-24 10/10. Another plateaued at 8/10. Yet another named it a “Workhorse Budget”. Flip, and the Congress called Budget 2023-24 a “poll manifesto”, an “election budget”, which perhaps hit the nail on the head. The thing to note was that nine years of Modi has ensured there were very few media left to make an impartial review. That being said, the BJP and the Modi government knew they had one last chance to make sure yet another term. So, the budget focuses on farmers. It puts the needle on the MSMEs in a post-Covid scenario. It puts the lens on the Middle Class. Budget 2023 makes an appeal to the Middle Class to keep voting the BJP with a slew of personal income tax sops. The Middle Class has of late been a little displeased with the Modi government. The income tax concessions, the BJP hopes will correct the incorrect impression.
It has long been held that the Middle Class helps snatch victory from the jaws of electoral defeats. More money in Middle Class pockets keep a big section of the electorate friendly. Farmers are another crucial constituency which the BJP could not ignore if it wanted to win 2024. The devil is in the details. The farmer hasn’t been happy with the Modi regime. The 3-farm laws are history, but the scars remain and Modi’s MSP promise hasn’t been kept. Budget 2023-24 was yet another chance to bring the farmers around. However, Budget 2023-23 actually saw farmers ignored all over again. Experts say farmers haven’t got their due with this budget, too. There is no sight of the MSP. And farmers’ schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Fazal Bhima Yojana are on the verge of falling off the cliff. Perhaps, the Modi government continues to believe that 80 percent of India’s farmers were for the 3-farm laws and would vote for the BJP. Another poll issue which Budget 2023-24 could not overlook was jobs and unemployment. Both have throughout the nine Modi years been in the red. And BJP spokespersons steered clear of coming clean on both jobs, and unemployment. Budget 2023 was another chance for the BJP and the Modi government to change the perception that the Modi government was a slacker when it came to jobs.
The simple truth is, it’s a budget for Modi, a budget for a third term for Modi. It wasn’t a “Budget for India”. From now on to the first and the last of the nine assembly elections of 2023, things would move at an electric pace faced with manifestoes galore from all parties concerned, the Modi government could not have missed the opportunity to use the budget to win 2023, and 2024.
