Outrage Over Budget Is Actually Fatigue Over Government Messaging

There is tremendous social media outrage after the budget speech yesterday (23 July).

A lot of the noise centres around the middle class not getting any tax cuts.

Also, a lot of anger is directed at the removal of indexation for realty investments' long term capital gains tax — even if the rates have been slashed 7.5 per cent.

While rising living costs does put the lower middle class in a financially precarious position, the angst may not necessarily be about the actual tax rates not being cut.

Further, it is not as if the lower middle class doesn't recognise the challenges inherent in turning around the political economy of a large country such as India's. This is the same class that backed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in all urban centres across India only a few weeks ago. 

If the lower middle class acknowledges the difficulties and continues to back the government in the hustings, why then are they outraging today?

Perhaps, the anger on display in some social media circles is a measure of fatigue with the government's communications.

For 10 years, this audience and the rest of the country has been saturated with content being pushed into their feeds.

For 10 years, the entire country has been told that the government has been always doing the right thing for the country. As ruling parties tend to do all the time — all references to the government's work has been in superlative terms. 

On top of this saturation messaging came the BJP's inability to construct a national narrative in its favour in key states. The June 2024 verdict showed that there was no all-encompassing national narrative or event favouring one party.

In the absence of such narrative, momentum fatigue and a sense of irritation are natural. This is not to say that voters have abandoned the party or its leadership — no, but as it happens in any close relationship over years a sense of 'reconciling to less than perfection' creeps in and tries to find a vent.

The BJP's main challenge therefore, is to figure out how to address the fatigue towards government-side messaging. The main task is not countering the outrage with more fact-checking. The latter risks the danger of doing more damage than good. For now, the best thing to do is not to feed the outrage.