‘Facts stated by PM are wrong, exaggerated’

The Interim Budget of the BJP offers a range of sops in the run-up to the general elections, with a rebate for taxpayers up to ₹5 lakh annual income, assured income support for the farmers and a pension scheme for unorganised workers.

As the Budget Session nears its end, fresh revelations in the Rafale jet fighter deal have altered the political narrative and the opposition Congress has started talking up its alternative vision against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “New India” promise.

Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, who heads the Congress’s manifesto committee, spoke to

BusinessLine on how the hype surrounding the populist Budget has already disappeared and why his party’s commitments to welfarism are more credible than the BJP. Chidambaram spoke in the aftermath of the release of his collection of columns Undaunted: Saving the Idea of India .

Excerpts from the interview:

We can do a fact check on every speech made by the Prime Minister, including the last one he made in the Lok Sabha two days back. I wish the media would run a fact check on him the way they do in the US with Donald Trump. Every fact that the PM puts out can be shown to be either wrong or exaggerated. Yesterday, an analysis was printed of the claim he has made on the houses that have been built in the last five years. The claim is false based on data published by this very government. It is all very well to build a false narrative but no one is foolish enough to believe that the world began on May 26, 2014. The middle class, or middle India as we know it, is a child of liberalisation, of the reforms attempted between 1991-96 by the Congress and subsequently by the United Front government in 1996-98, the Atal Behari Vajpayee government in 1999-2004 and by the UPA government, particularly the UPA-1 between 2004-09. If people still believed in this myth of, this so-called ‘New India’, that is being sought to be created by this government, the election results in Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh would have been different.

I admire a gentleman who has risen from humble backgrounds to become Prime Ministers of India. But Modi is not the first person. Lal Bahadur Shastri had humble origins. Manmohan Singh and IK Gujral were penniless refugees from West Pakistan. There are any number of people from very humble backgrounds who went on to become chief ministers — K Kamraj was one. Mamata Banerjee comes from a humble background and even today, she lives in very humble dwellings. While I admire such a person, I don’t think one should make a virtue of humble origins.

What does the Congress represent against the PM’s “New India” vision? Is it not a fact that you’re more welfarist when in Opposition than when you were in power? The expenditure on health and education was nowhere near what you promised during the UPA’s tenure.

It is important that we spend on education on health. It is equally important to ensure that the very poor of this country have a minimum amount of food and clothing and shelter besides access to education and healthcare. We may not have spent 6 per cent on education and health but we did expand access to education and healthcare during the UPA tenure. There was quantitative expansion, there was almost universal enrolment in schools and there was a huge expansion in scholarships available to the very poor. You have to just wait for our narrative and our manifesto. Our minimum income guarantee announcement has certainly stumped the government. There was a feeble response in terms of giving ₹2,000 per land-owning farmer family before the elections which, in simple language, is a bribe for vote. ₹2000 per land-owning family is not going to alleviate any farmer out of poverty. Our vision is far superior with respect to jobs, investment, industry especially SMEs, access to credit and we will also present a credible narrative on how India can harness technology and science rather than this Skill India, Start-up India etc. The farthest this government has gone in harnessing science and technology for development is Aadhaar, and Aadhaar is more misused than put to good use. Besides that, where is the use of technology in development? For everything, their answer seems to be — link Aadhaar to your bank account, to your PAN card, to your LPG. That is rudimentary, not harnessing science and technology for development.

₹6,000 per land-owning family will benefit the cultivating owner as well as the absentee landlord. What is the justification to benefit the absentee landlord? The flip side is that it does not benefit the tenant farmer or the agricultural labourer. So, this is a scheme which is narrowly directed to the land-owning farmer and one-half or one-third of the scheme will go towards the undeserving absentee landlord. How does ₹6,000 alleviate poverty? According to our calculations, increases in input prices caused by this government’s tax policies amount to ₹24,000 per farmer per year. So you increase his cost by ₹24,000 per year and you give him back ₹6,000, what kind of pro-farmer programme is this? If you want to lift the farmer out of poverty, you have to give him a minimum income guarantee. Bring his income to a level where you can say with certainty that he has got out of the poverty trap, which is what we have promised and we will unveil in our manifesto.

The PM made a powerful case of his “55 months-versus-Congress’s 55 years” where he questioned the Congress’s stated commitment to the poor and what has been done in reality.

There are two aspects to welfare — to define your commitment to welfare and the second is to provide resources to those commitments. I can give you a long list of programmes that the UPA initiated when I was Finance Minister which proves our commitment to welfare — MGNREGA, expansion of number of seats in high educational institutions by 54 per cent, the Right to Food Security, National Health Mission, Right to Education, the National Pension Scheme and so on. When it comes to providing resources, a government can only provide the resources it has. We think we provided adequate resources for each one of the commitments I have outlined so far. But I would readily concede that if we had the money, we ought to have provided more resources. The fact is while we demonstrated our commitment to these measures which promoted welfare, we did what was permitted by the resources we had. If we had more money, we would give. Each of these owes its origin to the Congress.

So we showed intent and placed resources to the extent we could. The BJP shows neither. This Budget, for instance, has pulled the wool over the eyes of the people. Let’s take their new pension plan. Please remember in 2015, they launched the Atal Pension Yojna which was, in many ways, better than the present scheme. There was a defined contribution, defined benefit and the promise of the return of the corpus submitted by the subscriber. Nevertheless, the Atal Pension Yojna flopped. They could only enrol 1.33 crore people as against their claim of 10 crore. They’ve now scrapped the Atal Pension Yojna because they have launched a new Yojna which requires you to subscribe, at a minimum age of 18 and a maximum age of 40, for an unbroken period of 42-20 years. The first payout is after 20 years when neither Modi nor Piyush Goyal will be there. So, what kind of a plan is this when the first payout will happen after 20 years knowing that Goyal has allotted ₹500 crore. And did you know that except in paragraph 37 of the Budget speech, this ₹500 crore does not figure, subject to correction, in any of the Budget documents? I have done my best to scour through the documents, I don’t find that number, ₹500 crore anywhere else. This is the biggest jumla they have uttered. The first payout would be 20 years later!

Let us come to the Income Tax slab having been raised to ₹5 lakh which amounts to a gross violation of the Constitution. Even a government which has five years and is entitled to present five budgets has to amend the Finance Bill every year for direct tax rates. Please look at the Finance Bill of any year, the first few sections will lay down the direct tax rates for one year, even if you repeat the same rates for a second year, you will have to amend the Finance Bill again. What business does a government, which has effectively 56 days in office, have to amend the Finance Bill and impose rates which will apply for the whole year? And look how clumsy they have made it — you can give relief in many ways. One way is to do it through a tax rebate. Another is to give it by tweaking the tax slabs. There are other ways. This government has chosen to give relief by tweaking the tax rebate from 2,500 to 12,500. Suppose the next government wants to do it in a different way and give the same relief in a different way. It will have to annul these amendments and make fresh amendments. As it is the Income Tax Act is a completely messy Act and they have made it messier for the next government. That is why no outgoing government has the right to amend the I-T rates. And they have given relief on the second house owned by a person, relief on notional rental income. Suppose another government wants to give relief in a different way. Are you not unwarrantedly binding the hands of that government? And how many people have, besides their own home, two other houses? I don’t grudge the relief given to the middle class but I can think of better ways of giving them relief.

Never before has the RBI been undermined in such a systematic manner, never before have the prestigious educational institutions such as JNU been taken over by planting an avowed RSS person as the Vice-Chancellor and provoking the whole faculty and student body to protest this appointment. Never before have vacancies been allowed to accumulate in independent or semi-autonomous bodies like the Competition Commission of India, the Securities Appellate Tribunal, the Information Commission; the SAT got a chairman only a few weeks ago. If judges are not appointed, who is the biggest beneficiary? It is the government which is the biggest litigant.

The CBI, ED, the I-T Department’s investigation department, the CVC have all been compromised to a degree that one has never noticed before. I am not saying that there was no erosion in the past but this degree of undermining is unprecedented. Have you ever come across a situation where three successive CBI chiefs are under a cloud? The number 1 and number 2 run parallel organisations; these are unprecedented developments.

Look at the way demonetisation was done. Can a decision like demonetisation taken in any other country in the manner it was done here by commanding the RBI to meet in Delhi and endorse the decision an hour before the Cabinet was to approve it? By keeping the Cabinet completely in the dark? Take the Constitutional Amendment to provide 10 per cent reservation to the poor. It is such a fraught issue that it should have been debated for weeks and months.

Let me tell you the facts — on the January 6 evening, the Cabinet approved the proposal. On January 7 morning, the Minister of State for Social Justice submits a written answer to a question in Parliament that no such proposal is under consideration. An hour later, the Bill is introduced in the Lok Sabha and it is passed on the same day.

On January 8, the Bill is introduced in the Rajya Sabha and passed the same day. It takes three years to make the Constitution, it takes less than three days to amend it. And on the day it is amended, a Minister is telling Parliament there is no such proposal under consideration which means that the Secretary and the MoS were not taken into confidence.

I am questioning this style of functioning which undermines the Cabinet, the ministries, the institution of the secretary to the Government of India. Modi has only implemented one-half of his promise of “Minimum Government Maximum Governance” in that there is Minimum Government and the Government is only the PMO.

Look at the way the PMO conducted parallel negotiations in the Rafale deal provoking (the then Defence) Secretary Mohan Kumar to note in his own handwriting that parallel negotiations conducted by the PMO have “undermined our negotiating position seriously”.

The Defence Minister sits on the note for 40 days and then records weakly that you’re over-reacting.

After 40 days? Why did he not call him the next day and tell him the same thing. Look at the two dates on which the two notings have been made. And what happened in those 40 days is a story that remains to be told.