MARXIST LENINIST PARTY OF INDIA (RED FLAG)
Central Committee
COCHIN, 3rd February 2023
AN ANTI-PEOPLE PRO-CORPORATE BUDGET
In the adverse international situation of predicted recession and weak post pandemic recovery the union budget 2023 -24 has failed to provide for strengthening the purchasing power of the people that was cardinal for enlivening the economy. This is discarded by persistent cuts in allocations to such ends. Drastic cut of 13000 crores in the allocation for MGNREGA is a striking example. This cut has come when the working class has raised demand for extending MGNREGA to urban areas and its duration up to 200 days with enhanced pay. No direct and effective spending to enhance employment is there in the budget. It simply booms the empty vessel of imaginary plans and unrealisable allocations in the most vague way without any vehicular instrument for possible implementation, especially aiming at the essential immediate effect. This will further widen the already gaping difference of wealth distribution worsening the realisation crisis ever faster. At present 1 per cent in India has amassed more than 40% of the wealth within 2021-22 and 2022-23. This budget will accelerate this negative tide.
Subsidies are cut in a big way all along as explicit from the reductions in food subsidies such as food subsidies, fertiliser subsidies and petroleum subsidies by ninety thousand, fifty thousand and six thousand nine hundred crores respectively. In the last Financial year taxes had been collected 10.5% more but expenditure estimation had been revised merely 7% more. Capital expenditure plans are embedded with a hidden agenda of disinvestments and sell outs as the earmarked 10 lakh crores, inclusive of 2.4lakh crores for Indian railways, are linked essentially with private public partnership projects. Allocations for agriculture are directed towards startups instead of ensuring crop realisation by way of Ensured Procurement System with Fair Procurement Prices and ensured Market Support Price system. This facilitates the neo-liberal agenda of decimation of the existing farmers' strata transforming the agriculture sector to a venture-capital-investment-friendly mode. Exemplifying Modi government's disregard to farmers, the PM Kisan Fund allocation is reduced from Rs. 68,000 crores to Rs. 60,000 crores.
The Finance Minister has explicitly stated that indirect taxes stood as the mainstay and the direct taxes have to be reduced. Chief dividends of this shift go to the corporates and the rich. Along with that, the middle income section including the salaried class and the petit bourgeois that earn up to rupees 7 lakh per annum has been exempted from the tax-net if they have opted for the new tax regime. This might be a nice cake for the said slice-section but, price rise and inflation along with the increasing indirect taxes will eventually eat it up. The FM has stated that the tax concessions to the rich and the overall tax proposals would lead to a revenue loss of Rs. 35,000 crores in 2023-24.The fiscal federal rights of the states have been continuously curtailed in this budget too byway of reduction of the states’ resources given by the union government such as GST compensation and development fund allocations. Besides reducing the quantum, fresh conditionalities have been imposed on state governments for accessing loans.
Overall, the budget 2023-24 by the Modi government has discarded the popular plea expressed by the needy and the toiling people in general and workers and peasants in particular providing for the corporate capital houses and the rich. It has made the road to catastrophe shorter and the social depletion faster.
We demand the scrapping of the anti people provisions of the proposed budget and the reinstatement of social subsidies with necessary enhancements and acceptance of the demands by the working class, peasantry and the other toiling and downtrodden sections of the society. We call upon the proletariat and the peasantry to rally in protest against this anti-people pro corporate budget and appeal to the people of all walks of life to join the popular protest.
M S Jayakumar,
General Secretary