The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) has opined that the 2024 election manifesto issued by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday has proved one more time that its slogan of ‘Viksit Bharat’ (developed India) is only limited to talk and in practice all its efforts are aimed at “Vibhajit Bharat’ (divided India).
Despite repeatedly claiming that four sections — women, youth, poor and farmers — were priority for it, the manifesto released had nothing for those sections as they were badly neglected. In separate statements, BRS senior leaders B. Vinod Kumar and T. Harish Rao said there was no mention of farm loan waiver in the manifesto, though several States had demanded that the Centre bear or share the burden.
Stating that it was easy to make promises before elections but difficult to keep them, the BRS leaders said the Narendra Modi government had written off ₹12 lakh crore loans of corporate companies but had not waived loan of even one farmer. The Centre had promised interest-free loans up to ₹1 lakh to farmers in 2019 but it was not given to any farmer.
The tall talk of making the country a food processing hub, making a budgetary allocation of ₹25 lakh crore to agriculture sector, shelter to every homeless family, gas connection to every family, mini airports, national status to projects, income tax subsidies to middle class, jobs to 2 crore youth every year, quota for backward classes in legislative bodies, scheduled castes categorisation, increase in upper limit of reservation beyond 50% and many others were reduced to writings on water, they observed.
