“Interim Budget is just the trailer of the Budget for New India post elections.”
– Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
One thing is clear from the budget – You should never doubt the intelligence of Modi and Shah and you should never ever doubt the competency of their government.
They don’t act like Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government where the leader, Atal ji, was highly ethical and moral and could not understand how to deal with fake lies and propaganda politics of Gandhi Parivar.
There is no doubt that the coffin scam of 2003 which later proved not to be a scam by CBI court in 2013 was propaganda on which the success of Congress relied at 2004.
Modi once said in one of his Parliament speeches that one could doubt anything about him but one shouldn’t ever doubt his political acumen.
He was right.
More than being honest he knows how to run the government and how to answer opposition. If being honest led you to lose elections then in my opinion that honesty is not equivalent to intelligence.
The difference between Modi and Atal ji is the same difference that was between Master Dinanath Chauhan and Vijay Dinanath Chauhan in the film “Agneepath”. Both were good people and while one didn’t know how to handle sinister, the other knows how to answer the antagonist in his own language.
I am a massive right winger, a BJP supporter and a big fan of Modi but the recent happenings over past few months had scared me like anything; like overstretching of the Rafale case for which there is no proof of any ill-doing by the government. Rahul Gandhi here is trying to do a Coffin Scam repeat but I am pretty sure the public has moved over that kind of dirty tricks in politics. Then the inclusion of the Indira Gandhi look-alike Priyanka Gandhi, who has no resume and merits when it comes to politics but is expected to win the seats at Lok Sabha elections. She has never done anything for anyone in her constituency. I think she is one of a kind Politician in the entire world who had won the vote by just showing her face. However, this time I believe the voters are more intelligent than that and know whom to vote and whom not to vote. The maha-gatha-bandhan was again an obstacle for the country’s progress where we saw old enemies like Akhilesh and Mayawati coming together to defeat the greatest thing ever happened to our country.
But somehow deep down I knew that Modi must be having something in his arsenal which he would only fire when the time is right.
There are few cardinal rules in the court of law and also in the game of poker and they apply well in politics. You don’t reveal your cards too soon. Let the opponent get happy first because a happy opponent is more prone to make mistakes. For an amateur, the smaller short-term achievements are a source of happiness but a true player knows when to open his final cards. The trump cards are always saved for the last. Something that Atalji didn’t know but Modi knows very well. That is why he said after the budget presentation that it is just a trailer.
We are in the fifth year of Modi government and the country is doing extremely well but wait, there is more for you. Budget, I believe is just the beginning. There is an agenda of ram mandir construction as well which is currently the most popular agenda and they are going to score a point over there as well.
Congress had their chance. They could have achieved so much in their time but they didn’t because they believed that they were invincible and somehow time had also always favoured them.
The budget today talks about the poor people, the middle class, the lower middle class, the film industry, the cottage industry, the start-ups, the small business owners and much more. It targets everyone they haven’t targeted before and now the opposition has nothing to talk about because that was the agenda they thought they would use to target the current government. Modi took away their agendas and nothing could anger them more.
Every argument I read was as baseless and meaningless as it could be and it felt heartwarming to see that none had a good argument against the great budget that Piyush Goyal ably presented.
For Yashwant Sinha, it was a matter of constitution. He said that it was unconstitutional to present a complete budget as an interim budget but when asked what he liked and disliked about the budget, he had no answer. He couldn’t approve it because his ego won’t allow it and he couldn’t disapprove it because he didn’t have the right arguments. The budget was mostly devoid of any ulterior motives. Large chunks of money are allotted to the defence, railways and health care, talking against which could bring an ire of the public.
It is a cash for votes budget. It is illegal for a candidate to do it but when the govt does it is perfectly valid. I hope the people of India will not be fooled by these last minute gimmicks.
— Yashwant Sinha (@YashwantSinha) February 1, 2019
Congress under the muddied leadership of Rahul Gandhi targeted the yearly money of 6000 Rs. allotted to farmers having less than 2 hectares of land. It was a childish comment and was heavily trolled for its obvious logic. I don’t know how suddenly congress twitter portal has started showing off their mathematical skills in every tweet. Putting numbers everywhere isn’t a sign that it is a factual truth.
Dear NoMo,
5 years of your incompetence and arrogance has destroyed the lives of our farmers.
Giving them Rs. 17 a day is an insult to everything they stand and work for. #AakhriJumlaBudget
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) February 1, 2019
किसानों को 500 रुपए प्रतिमाह का नकद हस्तांतरण उनकी समस्याओं के साथ क्रूर मजाक है। कर्ज माफी करने के बजाय नकद हस्तांतरण से किसानों को विशेष राहत नहीं मिलने वाली।#Budget2019 #AakhriJumlaBudget pic.twitter.com/RTX4pL8FSG
— Congress (@INCIndia) February 1, 2019
Chidambaram had another agenda and he wrote an entire open letter in Twitter complaining that budget speech was divided into Hindi and English so many people didn’t understand it. The lack of valid and powerful arguments was rampant today in opposition.
OPENING STATEMENT OF P CHIDAMBARAM pic.twitter.com/Jk1WM8En5k
— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) February 1, 2019
Mirror Now anchor Faye D’Souza was talked why Mr. Goyal is not presenting the budget in a language other than Hindi and faced a backlash later. She deleted her tweet. NDTV anchors, Nidhi Razdan wrote that the budget plans will be implemented only in July when the full-length budget will be presented in the main session post elections. Later she had to issue a corrigendum without apologizing that the budget will be implemented from April 1 and not after July budget session.
Another important clarification: CBDT chief tells @vikramchandra that all the tax announcements made in the Budget today will be implemented from April 1, 2019. So the rebate also comes into effect now
— Nidhi Razdan (@Nidhi) February 1, 2019
My friends who are on social media called me to call me ignorant after I posted few posts in praise of the budget. They argued that I do not understand the evil motives of BJP behind this budget and when I asked them whether they have seen the budget, the answer was yes, but they have only seen glimpses of it. Well, I have been sitting on my laptop from 11 o’clock to see the budget session live and later research more on it for another 3 hours. There hasn’t been a single con that I could infer about the budget and they can’t argue with me about a topic they didn’t invest some time to know more about it. It was like they were criticizing it for the sake of criticising it.
Modi knew from the beginning that the budget was a masterstroke and he seemed to thoroughly enjoy it. If you had seen him thumping table loudly with a broad smile on his face, you would know how sure he was of the impact this budget was going to have on the opposition.
The biggest highlight came at the end. It was the tax rebate on people having income less than or equal to 5 Lakh. It was the climax of the budget session.
One of my friends commented on my facebook post about the budget that the people with more than 5 lakh of income still have to pay tax. I replied, “Were they not paying earlier”. Instead of being happy that people of a certain category got tax rebate they are trying to divert the topic to the people who didn’t get the tax cut. Well, they didn’t get a tax cut because they didn’t need it, as of now. My friend had no idea who many people will be benefited from this one single fiscal decision. Lots of small business owners, startups can now start their own business and does not have to worry about tax till they become profitable. The lower middle class does not have to pay taxes and they will be motivated to invest their money in provident funds, gratuity funds and insurance which will only benefit them in the future.
No matter what naysayers will say, the damage has been done. The so-called political aficionados must be sitting at their offices right now brooding over how to counter this masterstroke by Modi. He even made tough to please Film Industry happy which is mostly left inclined. When earlier it took several windows running to get all certificates for a film, now it will be just one window solution. Apart from that, the piracy laws are made stricter.
BJP has shown the people that they are pro-people and do not believe in dividing people based on religions rather they would help people based on their economic standards, not their caste, creed or religion.
There is a video of Manmohan Singh viral now on Twitter in which he says that the country belongs to its minorities, mainly Muslims but in the similar context, Goyal said that the country belongs to poor. What a great difference in party ideology.
Fake Secularism of Congress v/s REAL Secularism of BJP -Resources par Pehla adhikaar Garibon ka hai 🙏👏👏 👏👏 pic.twitter.com/Wq4hEe6lkQ
— Rosy (@rose_k01) February 1, 2019
There is no way BJP juggernaut can be stopped now.
After years I am feeling hopeful for the country and believe that something good is finally happening. I called my friend who was planning to leave the country a few weeks ago. He said he would either go to the US or Canada to start his own business. Since he is in the finance sector, I wanted to know his opinion so I called him. He told me that when initially the government introduced digitization of documents, he criticized them because it would involve too much work involving scanning of bills and other documents. But now he says that he has realized the importance of it. The records can be easily maintained online and processing can be really fast due to which, as promised by the government, the returns will be credited back to accounts in less than 24 hours after filing. By the end of the conversation, he told me that this time his vote is definitely going for Modi. As of now, he has now chucked the idea of leaving the country and has decided to start his business here only as the laws and privileges for MSME (Micro Small Medium Enterprises) has increased tremendously. The loans are easily available at a lower rate of interest and the ease of starting your own company was never better.
If this was a Hindi film, I would say that Modi has taken the revenge of humiliation that Atalji suffered in 2004 when his highly competent government fell down owing to fake propaganda, dirty and dynasty politics.