Rahul Gandhi spreads fake news about “no increase in defence budget”, here’s the truth

The Union Budget for the financial year 2021-22 was presented by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday. No sooner did the historic address of the Finance Minister conclude, that illiterate ignoramuses from the opposition ranks began remarking how the Budget was a disaster from the word go. Being the captain of idiocy, the Congress party went a step further and organised an entire press conference dedicated to informing braindead Indian citizens about how they were being fooled by the Modi government and how their hard-earned money was about to be gifted away to a few crony capitalists.

That is usually the drill after every Union Budget for the Congress party. This year, however, former and future Congress President Rahul Gandhi and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram took to lying through their teeth on the issue of this year’s defence budget. While Rahul Gandhi in a tweet pondered as to why there was no increase in the defence budget for the soldiers, even though “Mr. Modi did PR photo-op with them on Diwali”, P Chidambaram took to calling the defence budget “flat”.

Chidamabaram said, “she did not mention Defence at all, as if the Chinese had vacated occupied Indian territory. She did not mention that defence expenditure in 2021-22 will see no rise. It is flat at ₹3,47,088 crore, almost the same as the ₹3,43,822 crore in the current year”.

That, as we better-learned citizens know, is a blatant lie. Perhaps expecting a former finance minister like Chidambaram to notice a 19 per cent hike in the defence capital outlay in this year’s budget was too much to ask for.  

That’s right! This year’s defence capital outlay has seen an increase of close to 19 per cent, amounting to Rs 1,35,060 crore, as compared to last year’s allocation of Rs 1,13,734 crore. The Indian Armed Forces will acquire new weapons, aircraft, warships and other military hardware out of this capital outlay. The remainder of the defence budget will not be used for modernisation or weapon and hardware acquisition. If that still does not satisfy the Congress party, despite the pandemic battering the pace of India’s galloping economy, for their information, the defence budget on a whole has been spiked by 1.4 per cent.

The Congress, expectedly, cannot comprehend such basic facts since they have the scoring of brownie points in the back of their mind. To achieve the same, Congress and its senior-most leaders are willing to peddle lies. The Grand Old Party has ceased to surprise a single soul with its antics.