June 15, 1998

Vajpayee's budget aims to bring Bharat closer to India

Prabhu Chawla

Like sharks in the water, the best predators are the quietest. But not this political shark -- our own mauni baba, the prime minister of India. Barely had the fire generated by the nuclear tests subsided, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was being pounded by yet another artillery attack launched by his political opponents, this time on his "lacklustre" budget.

If you believe the megaphones of the ancien regime, the first ever genuine non-Congress budget spells doom for India Inc. And if they have succeeded in creating this impression -- even temporarily -- the fault lies entirely at the doorsteps of the prime minister and his amateurish team of spin doctors who have failed to aggressively market the positive features of the BJP's economic policy. It is for the first time in five years that the budget has not been used as an instrument of instant cult promotion. The budget is meant for people living in Nagpur, not New York. As Vajpayee later said, the budget was aimed at bringing Bharat closer to India. But this was drowned in the cacophony of Cassandras.

Admittedly, the BJP's budget lacked big words and big ideas. To top it all, the prime minister failed to solicit the services of those who were paid both in cash and in kind by the previous regime for selling the budget to the media and opinion-makers. If the BJP's budget is under attack from within and outside, it is primarily due to its inability to bribe the non-voting classes by doling out heavy tax rebates -- a permanent right granted to the urban elite during the Congress regime.

Vajpayee's budget has reverted to the basics: health, water and education. "India lives in its villages," the country's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru once said. But neither he nor his daughter and grandson made serious attempts to turn these villages into viable economic units. The first genuine non-Congress prime minister and the first ever finance minister from Bihar have chosen to take the Nehruvian philosophy seriously. Ironically, both are targets of the Nehru family and the party literally owned by it -- a party solely responsible for the abominable state of the Indian economy. But keeping with his non-confrontationist style, Yashwant Sinha refrained from making even one critical remark about previous regimes. Both Manmohan Singh in 1991 and P. Chidambaram in 1996 made scathing attacks on their politicial opponents for ruining the economy.

Curiously, it is almost the same core team led by Oxford-educated Finance Secretary Montek Singh Ahluwalia and the charming and affable Chief Economic Adviser Shankar Acharya who outlined the basic structure of the BJP's budget. By being actively involved in the making of the seventh consecutive Union budget, Ahluwalia has set a bureaucrat's record of sorts. Earlier, he, his former colleagues from the World Bank and the finance ministers were hailed by their peer group in the media as the architects of India's economic reforms, giving the country either dream- or growth-oriented budgets. Now, while they are being spared the opprobrium for a "shoddy" job, the saffron politicians have been targeted for the choicest abuses by the same people.

Vajpayee would do well to remember that David slew Goliath with a slingshot and a rock. However, since he is no David, his weapons of choice have to be more lethal.

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