On the back foot, Ashok Gehlot bats with the Budget

Maintaining a favourable perception is politics 101. In the last several weeks, the Ashok Gehlot government, usually on top of things, had found the narrative slipping away from its hands. It’s in this context that the state budget presented Wednesday needs to be seen.

Always quick on the uptake, the BJP has stepped up its attack on the Gehlot government since the alleged Alwar rape case of January. Though police have been saying a probe had found it to be a case of hit and run rather than sexual assault, the BJP’s charges of negligence put the Congress on the defensive at a time when its campaign in Uttar Pradesh centred around women.

After that, the faction-ridden BJP managed to put differences aside to go after the Gehlot government over the Rajasthan Eligibility Examination for Teachers (REET) leak. The perception was that things weren’t so bad for Gehlot even during the rebellion by Sachin Pilot in mid-2020, when Gehlot was in the driver’s seat.

On Wednesday, Gehlot unveiled a Budget full of sops, over a speech lasting almost three hours. He covered all the grounds, from unemployed youths to farmers, government employees, domestic electricity consumers, women, tourism and industry. With elections due only in end-2023, the joke in Jaipur circles now is how the CM would better this in the next Budget.

For the students unhappy with the government over job recruitment, the announcements included a promise to hold REET in July 2022, with 62,000 openings instead of 32,000 and no fees, a special anti-cheating cell to prevent irregularities, and a Bill against cheating. The CM also claimed that his government had provided employment to over 1 lakh people, recruitment for additional 1.25 lakh posts was on, and a lakh more would be recruited in the next year. This, he said, was a better record than the 2 lakh jobs said to have been provided by the previous BJP government.

A union of unemployed led by Upen Yadav has been running an active, high-decibel campaign against the state government, including on social media.

Also on Gehlot’s checklist was the big-ticket announcement of the Indira Gandhi Shehri Rozgar Guarantee Yojana for urban areas, along the lines of MNREGA, as well as an increase of man-days under MNREGA. The scheme has seen an increasing number of takers since Covid began.

Another key announcement was a return to the Old Pension Scheme for those appointed after January 1, 2004. It’s an overture likely to be welcomed by the government employees in the state, with the extra cost only to be borne by the next government that comes in.

Tej Singh Rathore, general secretary, All Rajasthan State Government Employees Federation, said around 3 lakh state government employees who joined after 2004 will benefit. “Some of them will be entitled to voluntary retirement from service with pension benefits after 2024 while the retirements in the natural course will take place from around 2028-29.”

Incidentally, as Rathore pointed out, a state government employee strike that went on for 65 days in 2000, over the non-announcement of dearness allowance and surrender leave, was seen as one of the reasons for the defeat of the first government led by Gehlot.

In October last year, while flagging off an ‘Administration with Villages/Cities’ scheme, Gehlot had lamented how despite his “good work”, he had failed to get re-elected twice, and one of the reasons he cited was the employees’ strike.

For the farmers too, the Gehlot budget had several measures, including subsidies and free crop loans amounting to Rs 20,000 crore in the next year. The BJP and Congress have often traded barbs over farm loan waivers. Farming families number around 85 lakh in the state.

Although not in as much focus as in his previous budget, Gehlot announced several health schemes too, including doubling the insurance sum under the flagship Chiranjeevi Yojana from Rs 5 lakh to 10 lakh per family.

Of course, questions remain as to how the government will arrange funds for the ambitious Budget announcements.

Seeking to seize the narrative from the government after the Budget, the BJP, as an afterthought, announced that all MLAs of the party would return the iPhone 13s handed to them on the budget day. Incidentally, last year, the BJP had kept the iPads that were given away on budget day to all MLAs. The polls, of course, were more than 2.5 years away at the time.