On poll eve, will Yogi Adityanath budget have Hindutva hue?

LUCKNOW: Having aggressively pursued the Hindutva agenda in his political campaigns by raking ‘Ali versus Bajrang Bali’, will chief minister Yogi Adityanath present his third budget for 2019-20 fiscal as a ‘Hindutva budget’ to focus on protection cow, Ganga and Ayodhya.

The BJP government had recently hinted at a minimum pension of Rs 500 per month for saints and sanyasis and the government has already spent nearly Rs 4,500 crore on Kumbh.

When finance minister Rajesh Agarwal tables the third budget on Thursday, general elections will be just months away and BJP workers and supporters expect sops for weaker sections and major announcements that can blunt consolidation of the formidable SP-BSP alliance.

Apart from funding Hindutva projects through budgetary provisions that include cow sheds, airport at Ayodhya and beautification of Vrindavan and Varanasi, the ruling party is also expecting populist schemes to woo women, farmers, poor and unemployed youth.

Last time, when finance minister Agarwal presented the budget, the total size was Rs 4.28 lakh crore and this time, it’s expected to rise by 11% and may cross Rs 4.88 lakh crore, a massive rise compared to the previous Samajwadi Party government.

In the first two budgets, the Yogi government did not have much space for populist schemes as it was burdened with loan waiver of nearly Rs 38,000 crore. This time, it’s free of baggage of financial commitments and is likely to make major allocations for infrastructure, including Metro railway in Kanpur, Meerut and Yogi turf Gorakhpur, airports at Ayodhya and Jewar, expressways in Poorvanchal and the Ganga Expressway.

So far, the Yogi government has failed to make a major impact on infrastructure as work on Poorvanchal Expressway and Jewar is still crawling. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath realises the huge political responsibility of repeating BJP’s 2014 performance of 71-seat win in the state. And this budget on eve of general elections is an occasion to take a major political leap to win voters.

The Union budget with Rs 500 a month for stressed farmers of the state has not gone down well with the farming community, and Yogi would attempt to announce more sops in the crucial run-up to elections to assuage hurt feelings. UP has the largest of nearly 2.25 crore farmers, of whom nearly two crore are marginal and one crore landless and tenant farmers, who have been left out of the central budget and would not get any “samman rashi” ( honorarium)