‘PM’s speech writers have lost their balance’: Chidambaram slams ‘15% of govt budget for Muslims’ remark

Senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his recent speech, where he claimed that the Congress party wanted to allocate 15 per cent of the government budget for Muslims in its previous regime. Chidambaram called the claims bizarre and said that the prime minister’s speech writers have lost all balance.  

“Hon'ble Prime Minister's statements are increasingly bizarre and show that his speech writers have lost their balance. Yesterday, he claimed that if he played the Hindu-Muslim divide, he would not be fit to be in public life. Today, he played his usual game of dividing Hindus and Muslims,” said the Congress leader, referring to PM Modi’s statement in an interview. Referring to his infiltrators comment that had kicked off a storm, the prime minister said in an interview ith News18, “"The day I do Hindu-Muslim, I will be unworthy of public life." 

Chidambaram said that PM Modi’s accusation that former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had drawn up a plan to spend 15 per cent of the Union Budget exclusively on Muslims is “completely false”. “His further allegation that Congress will present a Muslim budget and a Hindu budget is so outrageous that it can be only characterised as a hallucination. Article 112 of the Constitution of India contemplates only one Annual Financial statement, which is the Union Budget. How can there be two budgets?” argued the Congress leader.

Chidambaram said that it is his “fervent hope” that in the coming days of the election campaign, PM Modi would “abandon the path of false accusations and outrageous claims”. He said that not only are Indian people seeing and analysing this but people from across the globe too, and that such statements do not “bring glory to India”. 

Addressing an election rally at Pimpalgaon Baswant in north Maharashtra's Nashik, PM Modi had said that the 15 per cent budget proposal was brought about when he was the chief minister of Gujarat. He claimed that the BJP strongly opposed this proposal and hence it was not implemented, but if the Congress comes to power, they would implement it. 

Calling himself the chowkidar (watchman) of rights, PM Modi said he would not let Congress take away the rights of the deprived sections of society.