After six relentless years of inflation, the fuel price drop is not really a help
The Bharatiya Janata Party held its national executive meeting in Delhi on Sunday to discuss “ways to serve people”, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi put it on his Twitter account. The meeting assumes significance for two reasons; one that it comes just months ahead of the Assembly elections due in five States, and second that the BJP’s in the recent bypolls held for three Lok Sabha and 29 Assembly seats across 13 States has received mixed response; not to mention how it was clean sweeped in West Bengal and Himachal Pradesh, the home state of party president JP Nadda. The meeting was attended virtually by party Chief Ministers and party State presidents, except for UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who managed to make it to Delhi and was all praise to PM Modi for his “contribution”. The meeting included, of course, lauding the party accomplishments, jibes at the Opposition parties and blaming them for violence; however, it ignored significant issues such as fuel prices, farmers’ agitation, growing religious disharmony in the country and the Chinese intrusion at the LAC and, of course, the crumbling economy.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who too was present in the meeting, lauded the “commendable work of vaccination done in India” and slammed the Opposition for raising questions on vaccination carried by the Government from the very beginning. Economy, however, was not much talked about. Incidentally, a day after the meeting also marked five years of demonetisation (note ban), which the ruling BJP had touted as a revolutionary step to put an end to corruption and revive the economy. What happened after that is history. The struggles it induced upon the middle-class have now shaped into inflation, as warned by the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The simplest example is fuel. In 2014, when the ruling dispensation came into power, the prices of petrol and diesel in Delhi were Rs71.51 and Rs57.28 a litre respectively. The prices for the same have gone up to Rs103.97 and Rs 86.67 a litre respectively, that too after the Government decided to reduce the Central Excise Duty on petrol and diesel recently. After relentless price hikes over the last six years, this tiny relief might not necessarily help the BJP win votes in the upcoming Assembly polls, especially when the Aam Aadmi Party’s list of freebies looks more appealing.