Jaitley's Budget 2016 reveals Modi's mixed emotions for Manmohan

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the new Manmohan Singh. Manmohanics is the government's new mantra, which Modi has adopted lock, stock and barrel in Budget 2016 presented by Union finance minister Arun Jaitley in the Parliament on February 29.

Fighting political storm lashing his government, Modi has decided to silence the Congress and the Left-led opposition by stealing their plank. He has decided to take the fight to the opposition camp.

"Gaon, garib, kisan, mahila aur yuva" (village, poor, farmers, women and youth) are the focus of the government in the Budget," Modi said. By doing so, he has opened a new front against the opposition. He wants to deflect the opposition's attention from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Rohith Vemula rows.

Also read: Key takeaways from Budget 2016

Leave the bitter fight over the nationalism and patriotism behind, come and join the government's push to give the farmers their due, Modi seems to be telling the opposition.

The prime minister's intent is clear. The government has to take the sting out of the Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi's "suit-boot ki sarkar" barb. While the opposition tries to beat Modi with the charge of pushing ultra-nationalist politics down everybody's throat, the BJP will invade their rural citadels.

The great push on rural India and agriculture in the finance minister's third budget is imbued with as much political message as economic sense. Budgets are political statements first, economics later, is the message.

Politically, besides attempting to woo the rural India in general, the Budget has targeted the states going to elections in 2016 and 2017. Two key states, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, will be going to polls early next year before the presentation of the next Budget. Farmers, holding the key to success in both the states, are on the radar of the Modi government.

There is also a message for the Jat farmers who are up in arms in Haryana. Jats are a major farming communities in Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

Flow of more funds to the tune of Rs 2.87 lakh crore to the village panchayats - an overall Rs 87,000 crore under the rural development head and the announcement to double the income of farmers in the next five years wears the hallmark of Manmohanics.

Even more, having mocked the UPA's flagship MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) programme as a "living monument" of the failure of the Congress, the government has jacked up allocation to the rural job guarantee scheme to Rs 38,500 crore from around Rs 34,000 crore. That's a big increase.

However, how Modi is going to ensure that the rural poor are not paid to "dig ditches", as he said ridiculing the Congress, is not clear.

What's also not clear is the overall direction that the government wants to take. Which Modi should one believe in? The one who has emerged after Budget 2016 or the one who promised to unleash an animal spirit through radical reform programmes?

The question is, has Modi given up the reform plank, which contributed to bringing him to the power in Delhi? Is Modi no longer the reformer and liberaliser he promised the voters to be in 2014?

How is Modi going to fulfil the promises of giving jobs to the aspiring Indian youth? Young men and women who had voted for him had pinned great hopes on him. They have been waiting for Modi to finally break the logjam and announce big bang reforms. They hoped the finance minister would come out with big bang programmes in his third budget, after having given it miss in the first two. That hope has been belied.

It's obvious that Modi is trying to walk a tightrope. Trying to maintain a balance between fiscal consolidation and boosting growth fuelled by reforms, Jaitley has chosen the former. That's fine. But that will not impress the youth, nearly one crore of them entering the job market every year.

Modi seems to have learnt a lesson or two from the resounding defeats in the Delhi and Bihar assembly elections. He saw how the aspirational youth who had voted for him changed sides within a short period of time in Delhi to bring the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) Arvind Kejriwal to power. He also saw how the voters changed sides to choose rural-oriented parties like the Janata Dal (United), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Congress over the BJP in Bihar.

In Modi's calculation, rural voters are less fickle, more committed to reacting positively to welfare schemes that the urban ones.

The Budget asks if the government is going to remain bogged down in balancing acts at the cost of big and innovative ideas and not take advantage of the global economic situation. The slowdown in China and the rock-bottom oil prices had presented opportunities for the government to initiate reforms with the potential to unlock the economy.

Fighting the opposition with his back to the wall, Modi has decided to play safe. Venturing out in new areas of reform would have required taking bold steps and would have opened new areas of contest with the opposition. The government has avoided that course of action.

The Congress' top economic minds like Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram have fumbled for words to criticise the Budget. The government has no "big ideas" was all that Manmohan Singh said, whereas for Chidambaram the Budget had "vindicated" the UPA's economic policies.

Budget 2016 reminds of Manmohan Singh and the economic policies he pursued as the prime minister. Yes, we have a new prime minister. His name is Narendra Modi Manmohan Singh.