From promising to ban all political messaging that uses the armed forces to proposing to raise an Ahir Armoured Regiment and a Gujarat Infantry Regiment, the Samajwadi Party’s vision document for the 2019 Lok Sabha election takes a swipe at the BJP’s nationalism narrative.
The party also strongly pushed the message of “mahaparivartan [grand change] with social justice”, to pitch the idea of change through the uplift of OBCs and Dalits and proposed an additional 2% tax on the rich, which it claimed was uniformly upper caste.
This marks a remarkable shift in the political messaging of the SP after the defeats in 2014 and 2017, when the party had contested on the theme of development.
The document, released by SP president Akhilesh Yadav at a press conference here, targeted the “increasingly desperate BJP” for using the armed forces as “an electoral tool” and accusing “all and sundry of being anti-national”. “This pseudo-nationalism threatens our national security more than any other external force,” it said.
Welfare programme
The party has proposed a State-specific family welfare programme to look after the families of the armed forces.
The mainstay of the document was the emphasis on “economics of social justice” through social mobility, housing and income to address inequality.
While saying that the “richest 10% of the population (uniformly upper caste)” own more than 60% of the country’s wealth, the SP proposed imposing an additional 2% tax on the total wealth of households owning more than ₹2.5 crore. “This works out to 1.1% of the GDP. We believe it is also time to add a top income tax bracket for the ultra-rich who hide their income using complex structures,” the SP said.
If voted to power, the SP-BSP-RLD alliance will demand “that central reservations be immediately updated to reflect the actual caste distribution in the population”.
Mr. Yadav said the path to progress and prosperity “cannot come about without social justice” and demanded that the caste-wise census be made public in the country.