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There was no drama and no tension, except for the time when a loud cheer erupted from women members of Parliament as an expression of gender pride for the country’s first female full-fledged Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as she walked in to present her maiden Budget.
It was quite an entrance: Sitharaman came bearing her Budget speech and documents in a swadesh bahi khatha – a ledger wrapped in red cloth – instead of the traditional Budget briefcase that almost all her predecessors used to bring along.
Arriving ahead of time, the Finance Minister sat calmly in her seat in the Treasury Benches; from the visitors’ gallery, her family watched with pride.
Beneath all the poise and calm, Sitharaman was manifestly a bit tense: she was after all presenting the first Budget of Modi 2.0. But once she began her speech, her oratorical skills came into play as she swung from English to Hindi to Tamil during her 2-hour-15-minute speech.
Long though her speech was, there was none of the customary interjections and interventions from the Opposition. Sitharaman’s manner was more like that of a professor holding forth, while her ‘students’ struggled to stay awake. When she had to emphasise a point, she repeated her sentences, drawing the attention of the House to the reiteration.
In an otherwise dense speech, a brief moment of lightness came when Sitharaman invoked an Urdu couplet.
“Yakeen hai toh koee raasta nikalata hai, hava ki oth bhi laikar chiraag jalata hain, ” she recited haltingly. She then broke into a child-like smile — and flashed a thumbs-up when her flawless pronunciation was acknowledged by her colleagues.
Later, when she recited from Pura Nanooru , a Tamil Sangam Era work by Pisirandaiyaar, only the DMK members applauded: evidently no one else understood it until Sitharaman offered a translation.
Surprise omission
Strikingly, Sitharaman’s speech made no mention of her predecessor Arun Jaitley — not even when she mentioned the GST Council’s good work in implementing the tax reform. “I am surprised,” said a veteran parliamentarian.
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