Advani

New Delhi, March 4: The BJP today slammed the farm loan waivers in the budget as “deception”, saying the scheme ignored those exploited by private moneylenders.

Gearing up to counter the image of the Centre as “Lady Bountiful”, the party set up a committee to study the actual impact of the waivers on farmers across the country.

The decision to set up the committee was taken at a meeting of the party’s parliamentary committee this morning, where leader of Opposition L.K. Advani asked the lawmakers to focus on the rising prices of essential items.

The panel, headed by senior leader Yashwant Sinha, doesn’t have much to find out — it has already been asked to “debunk” the Rs 60,000-crore waiver scheme. “The committee will study farmers’ problems and prepare a report to prove the loan waivers are a deception,” spokesperson Vijay Kumar Malhotra said. But even before the “study” was over, he declared the party would launch a “nationwide agitation” against the “deceit”.

To project the scheme as a farce, the committee will highlight the distress of farmers who took loans from moneylenders and try to build the case that this was possibly because banks didn’t lend to them. Kalyan Singh, Vikram Verma, Karabela Swain, Vijendra Pal Singh and Santosh Gangwar are the panel’s other members.

Party chief Rajnath Singh and Jaswant Singh, who also addressed the MPs, said there was a need to “expose the government’s statistical jugglery” and stress the fact that the interest rate for farmers hadn’t been cut.

Finance minister P. Chidambaram hasn’t even explained in the budget how he will raise the Rs 60,000 crore for the waivers, Advani told the MPs. He asked them to spread the message that the price rise was behind the crisis in agriculture and the common man’s problems.

The price-rise theme was later echoed in Lok Sabha, where the Shiv Sena joined ally BJP to accuse the government of ignoring the “worst-affected” farmers in Vidarbha.

Participating in the debate on the motion of thanks to the President’s address, the Sena’s Anant Geete said these farmers, who had to rely on moneylenders, would not benefit from the scheme of loan waivers.

“The budget 2008-09 has implemented only one of the recommendations of Radhakrishna Committee on loan waiver, but ignored a key recommendation of ensuring farm loans at 4 per cent,” BJP leader Ananth Kumar said.

UPA leaders, including Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Sharad Pawar, were competing to take credit for the waiver scheme. “They have scant regard for farmer suicides.”