Two Threads- One Needle

The members of various political parties had assembled to introspect and resolve socio-economic problems, but the representatives of our nation identified and revealed the problems of their opponents in the political race.

The first controversy that was brought to light was the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Narendra Modi expressed his belief that the Indian National Congress (Congress) had “falsified data” to show an increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and they had used MGNREGA to do the same. According to him, Congress added the number of people who had been given temporary jobs by this scheme during the calculation of GDP and the fact that the jobs would be given only for a hundred days was not considered.

Farooq Abdullah listed the benefits of the policy and its contributions towards rural employment. He believed that the government reduced 10,000 crores from the budget for MGNREGA due to unknown intentions and implicated the government of involving itself in illicit activities. Narendra Modi paid no heed to the allegations and replied that the budget had to be reallocated to other pertinent sectors. He stated, “Temporary employment cannot fill up the bellies of people”.

Mamata Banerjee countered by saying that the Central Data Office had provided proof that the GDP during the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was also meagre. Narendra Modi provided a tedious justification for the same. He spoke about the sudden boom of GDP in 2003, its subsequent slowdown because of the European crisis, and the trade war between the United States of America (USA) and China. More importantly, he questioned the correctness of GDP as a measure of the nation’s economy, which was irrelevant to the scope of the discussion. Mamata Banerjee said that the response of Narendra Modi failed to tackle the underlying essence of the question. She felt that the answer confused people the same way different tax slabs of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) did. She also compared BJP to a virus that was destroying the economy of the country.

The second thread of allegations that ensued was based on the agrarian sector. The consensus of the Congress and the third wing aligned in this aspect as both felt that the agricultural sector had been failed by the BJP. Gulab Nabi Azad affirmed that since farmers were unable to get money for their crops, the contribution of agriculture to GDP shrank from 6.7% to 2.9%, which contributed to the increased suicide rate of farmers. Rajnath Singh also specified that the budget allocation for agriculture was not considerable, taking into account all the different factors that came into play.

Different members of the BJP had differing ways by which they tackled these allegations. Manohar Lal Khattar questioned Asaduddin Owaisi (Owaisi) as to why the Congress provided pertinence to agriculture and discarded other issues such as Jammu and Kashmir, Ram Mandir and Triple Talaq. Owaisi replied that these issues did not cause the deaths of people and that the Congress would like to focus on actual problems. Amit Shah targeted the loan waivers introduced by the Congress, disclosing that only 52 crores of 6 lakh crore worth of loans had been waived and that the BJP had definitely performed better. Narendra Modi informed the committee that 2.5 lakh crores had already been sanctioned for this purpose by the BJP and he felt that they understood the impact that it would have on the economy.

The threads of allegations halted when the committee resonated with the statement of Gulab Nabi. He exclaimed that “politicians needed to think not about the victory of themselves, but that of their country”.

(Edited by Harsha Sista)