After staging a walkout from the Lok Sabha in protest against an "inflationary" Union Budget, BJP said its members oppose it when put to vote and would move cut motions.
"We are going to oppose the Budget. Cut-motion is a prerogative available in the Lok Sabha and we will definitely bring it to censure the government on its anti-people policies," senior BJP leader and former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha said.
He asserted that though there were several announcements in the Budget which were "anti-people", when Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced customs duty on petroleum products "he crossed the limit of tolerance of the people" and the party "spontaneously" decided to stage a walkout.
When asked if staging a walkout against the Budget was against Parliamentary propriety, Sinha said one such propriety has been broken by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who has not become a member of the Lok Sabha for the last six years.
BJP maintained that if it were to present the Budget, it would not have touched petroleum prices and "hastened slowly".
Sinha said increase in prices of petrol and diesel by almost the same amount is a "fundamentally flawed approach" as increasing diesel prices had a high cascading effect.
"Diesel is used in the transport (people and goods) sector, by the farmers and also in factories," he said.
Agriculture, rural development, health and education should have been the priority areas for Mukherjee, Sinha said alleging that the Finance Minister had sprinkled resources thinly over several sectors.
More From This Section
The former Finance Minister claimed that Indian economy is growing mainly due to domestic demand generated by its people and high savings made by them.
"These two are the engines of growth of Indian economy and most important consideration should be given to them to allow the economy to grow," he said.
Sinha enumerated three conditions which he asserted should be satisfied to stimulate domestic demand and increase savings by the people.
"Prices should be kept under control, there should be easier availability of funds and there should be money in people's pockets," Sinha said, adding, "The biggest challenge for the Finance Minister is to check price rise, especially of essential commodities."
He insisted that by announcing the new taxes, government had "added fat to fire". Sinha accused the Finance Minister of giving up instead of fighting price rise.
BJP also argued that there was no mention of how the government intended to tackle unemployment. Similarly, there was nothing on handling the agrarian crisis or for infrastructure development, with only 4 minor schemes being announced for the latter.
Even the power structure had been ignored which would affect both agriculture and industry, Sinha said.
He accused the Finance Minister of fudging figures to show a lesser fiscal deficit.
"We are sincerely but gravely disappointed with the budget," he said.