Budget: The election outcome and voter concerns can offer Sitharaman some clues

livemint.com:

The budget is now slightly more than a week away. Finance ministry officials would have already sifted through all the proposals, recommendations and advice received from various quarters, and taken a decision on which ones to retain and which ones to discard. Many proposals and measures are probably already in the oven for final baking; what is probably left are incorporating last-minute proposals from party members, updating data and putting final touches to finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s commentary.

There is another source that the finance ministry may wish to assess while drawing up the final contours of the new government’s first budget: the results of the latest general elections. The ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had claimed in a meeting of its office-bearers that it would increase its 2019 tally of 303 seats by 67 seats to 370 seats; the BJP, instead, lost 63 seats and ended up having to rely on coalition partners for support. The deepest cuts were delivered by Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal where its tally dropped by more than half.

Much newsprint and airtime has been devoted to analysing the myriad factors leading up to the 2024 Lok Sabha election results. As usual, there is probably not one particular reason but a multi-layered stack of causes. Three factors, among the multiple strands, make for compelling inclusion in the budget-making process.

One is the fact that even though the Lok Sabha elections are national in character, in reality each state follows different voting patterns. This had become an accepted home-truth for over two decades after the late 1980s, when the era of coalition governments began, and persisted for some time thereafter. However, over the past 10 years,