South India was briefly in the news for all kinds of reasons over the last week after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her record-breaking seventh Budget. Call it political expediency or a clear demonstration of affirmative action, many voices were heard all across media platforms about how Andhra Pradesh was the clear favourite among the five states that constitute peninsular India.
A massive Rs 15,000 crore was allotted for the proposed capital city Amaravati, apart from generous grants for Polavaram project. On the lines of Bundelkhand package, the backward districts of Rayalaseema and North Andhra were promised special grants. These are the main attractions highlighted apart from development of industrial corridors, notably Visakhapatnam-Chennai and Hyderabad-Bengaluru industrial corridors.
Quite expectedly, the NDA-III proposals didn’t find favour with AP’s neighbours. While Tamil Nadu went on protests both at Delhi and Chennai, Siddaramaiah castigated the FM and entered into a wordy duel accusing her of lying on allocations to Karnataka and taunting it as a ‘corrupt State’. Telangana CM Revanth Reddy too expressed his displeasure and his party came up with sarcastic references in its banners as to how the Centre has denied the new state its rightful due.
D K Suresh, who was earlier part of a massive controversy over his statements on ‘south India wanting to secede’ during the LS election campaign has repeated it again. Dragging his next-door neighbour Tamil Nadu also into the scene, he said calls for separation have already been raised there.
Despite being a federal entity, India has often had to contend with different treatments for different situations faced by its states, when it comes to seeking and receiving Central assistance. Over decades, both covertly and overtly, states which are preferred over the other have often received this exalted status because the political alignment is already in place with Delhi.
More often than not, this ‘discrimination’ has been condoned by the public as they are aware that this is the most potent weapon the Centre has to keep the states under leash. Conditioned to having many progressive and welfare-oriented projects put on the backburner in favour of populist freebie schemes, Indian public, irrespective of the region they hail from, have often seen one State being propped up against the other, quite often brazenly and deliberately.
Suresh has accused the NDA government of being partial to north India and Gujarat while not honouring the sentiments of the southern people who have this time given more seats to Modi and BJP than 2019. What is galling to the Kannadiga politicians is that the Finance Minister is a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka and despite being so, she has not given anything of worth to them.
Of course, a please-all Budget this one was not. The responses across various sections of the society have been welcoming with the representatives of each sector prising out some valuable measure or the other taken to boost Indian economy and keep it going in its pursuit of development till 2047 under ‘Viksit Bharat’ scheme.
There have been mixed opinions from hardcore Modi supporters with the media saying that not all of them are happy with it. Whatever it is, south India seems to have a genuine set of reasons for being left out in the cold. Whether it is political revenge or reprioritising one state over the other will be seen as the nation gets ready to witness an energised Opposition taking on the coalition government.
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