In his campaign speeches over the past week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the Congress wanted to put aside 15% of the budgetary allocations for minorities. He then vowed that he would not allow such “splitting of the Budget”, or religion-based reservation in jobs and education. The PM first made the statements at Pimpalgaon Baswant in Maharashtra’s Nashik district on Wednesday. “They want to dedicate 15% of the Budget for minorities. They want reservation for minorities. As the CM (of Gujarat), I staunchly opposed it. The BJP did not allow it to happen. Even Dr B R Ambedkar was opposed to reservation based on religion,” he said. Modi's claims were criticised by the Opposition, with senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, who was Finance Minister under the UPA government, calling them "totally false" and "increasingly bizarre". “For the last 75 years, we all know, there is only one Annual Financial Statement. So, how can there be two budgets, for the Hindus and for the Muslims? This is outrageous,” he said. In a post on X on Friday, Chidambaram said: "There was a statement in the Outcome Budget of the Ministry of Minority Affairs for the year 2013-14 (UPA) that, "wherever possible", 15 per cent of the outlay should be spent on development projects for MINORITIES. The word 'Muslim' did not occur in the statement. The SAME statement appeared in the Outcome Budget of the Ministry of Minority Affairs for 2016-17 (NDA). How did this perfectly normal statement in the Outcome Budget of the Ministry of Minority Affairs magically transform into a 'budget for Muslims'?. Obviously, Hon'ble PM took a normal statement in a normal report and twisted it into a 'budget for Muslims' under UPA. What nobody told him was that the SAME statement appeared in the Outcome Budget under NDA too!" * What could the PM be referring to? While Modi did not clarify his claims, he was possibly referring to the 15-point programme undertaken by the Manmohan Singh government in 2004. The plan stipulated that “wherever possible, 15% of targets and outlays under various schemes will be earmarked for the minorities”. A 15-point programme for minority welfare was first announced in 1983 by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It was designed to “counter the menace of communal disharmony and violence, ensure representation to minorities in government employment and provide a fair share to them in programmes for economic empowerment”. The UPA government revamped the idea, focusing special attention on uplift of minorities. In October 2004, months after it came to power for the first time, it announced the setting up of a National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, popularly known as the Ranganath Mishra commission. The panel began work in March 2005. Addressing Parliament in 2005, then President A P J Abdul Kalam said the Ranganath Mishra commission would “examine the social and economic status of these deprived groups and suggest mechanisms for enhancing their educational, employment and economic opportunities” while preparing “a white paper on the status of minority communities in India” to “recast the 15-point programme for the welfare of minorities”. In his Independence Day address the same year, Singh announced that the new 15-point programme would “have definite goals which are to be achieved in a specific time frame”. In March 2005, the government set up a second panel – a 'High Level Committee' – for preparation of a 'Report on the Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India'. It was headed by retired Justice Rajinder Sachar. The Committee was mandated to “consolidate, collate and analyse” the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community to “identify areas of intervention by the government to address relevant issues”. * What did the UPA's 15-point programme look like? In 2006, the Singh government announced the guidelines for the programme. The objectives were “enhancing opportunities for education, ensuring an equitable share for minorities in economic activities and employment, through existing and new schemes, enhanced credit support for self-employment, and recruitment to State and Central Government jobs, improving the condition of living of minorities by ensuring an appropriate share for them in infrastructure development schemes, and prevention and control of communal disharmony and violence”. The guidelines added that the programme was “to ensure that the benefits of various government schemes for the underprivileged reach the disadvantaged sections of the minority communities”. The government said it wanted to ensure that the benefits of government schemes went equitably to minorities, with the new programme also envisaging “location of a certain proportion of development projects in minority-concentration areas”. It is in these guidelines that the government said that “wherever possible, 15% of targets and outlays under various schemes should be earmarked for minorities”. The Government initially included 24 schemes, programmes and initiatives of 11 ministries and departments in the 15-point programme. * How did other parties react to this? The issue took a political turn in December 2007, when the BJP slammed the Singh government for including the 15-point programme in the draft of the Eleventh Five Year Plan. The BJP, which had been accusing the UPA government of minority appeasement, took this position ahead of the 54th meeting of the National Development Council (NDC) that was convened to approve the plan. In a statement, then BJP president Rajnath Singh accused the government of “trying to sow the seeds of discord, disharmony and disintegration by seeking to incorporate the aspect of communal budgeting through moves to reserve 15% funds for minorities”. “It is indeed unfortunate that under the Congress-led UPA government, a critical vision document that sets the tone and direction for national growth and development for the next five years, is now being treated as a tool of political appeasement,” Rajnath Singh said, adding the “move would give a fillip to competitive communal demands for budgetary allocations and, in the process, holistic approach to national development would become a casualty”. He declared that the BJP’s chief ministers would oppose if “any overt or covert move is taken to incorporate communal budgeting”. The BJP CMs of the time, led by then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi, opposed the move at the NDC meeting. Modi alleged the UPA government was resorting to "communal budgeting". PM Manmohan Singh rejected the charge, saying there was no attempt to divide the people on caste or religious lines and the focus remained on the most marginalised sections of the society. * What happened afterwards? The Eleventh Five Year Plan was approved. BJP leaders continued their criticism over the subject, but were not as vocal. The UPA government also continued to speak of the programme in its annual reports on governance. In the 2012-13 report, a year before it would lose power to the Modi-led BJP, the government said: “15 % of targets and outlays for schemes included in the PM’s New 15-Point Programme for the Welfare of Minorities were earmarked during the year, and this was closely monitored.”
