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Was the FM not feeling well? That was the first thought that ran through the mind while watching the normally suave and articulate Arun Jaitley – the sophisticated, urbane face of the BJP and, indeed, the NDA government – begin his Budget speech.
That he was out of his depth soon became evident as he fumbled through a long and winding Budget speech, which will barely get pass marks for its writers. It turned out that the FM was indeed unwell. The Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha who could speak extempore for long periods, making the Treasury benches in the UPA government squirm, read out the first 40 minutes of the Budget speech in a near monotone. The customary heckling from a badly depleted Opposition too was handled rather mildly by the man in the hot seat.
It was clear that Jaitley was unwell and perhaps running temperature when, before coming to the direct tax proposals, he asked for a five minute break which Speaker Sumitra Mahajan readily granted. When he resumed his speech, she allowed him to sit down and continue with the tax proposals.
If one was looking for some Urdu poetry or shers that Manmohan Singh used to deliver as Finance Minister, with some aplomb in days when his speech had not yet turned into a mumble, they were simply missing. Of course, P.Chidambaram’s Thirukkural couplets could not be delivered by our Punjabi FM.
But there was enough mirch masala available in the virtual world on what could have been. One of these said Jaitley told his fellow MPs that since all the North Indians were bored of listening to Thirukkural couplets, he would give them some spicy Punjabi poetry from Honey Singh.
Somebody else called him a “Chidambaram in disguise”. But the best reference was to Jaitley triumphantly displaying to the House his nameplate before beginning the Budget speech. Apparently, he didn’t want to take any chances with it after what had happened to the Railway Minister. So he took care to remove it and keep it in his Budget folder!
But the unkindest cut to not only the FM’s rendering of the Budget speech, but also his tax proposals for the social sector, came from an equity market analyst who was quizzed on a TV channel on why the market dived by over 300 points first before going up by another 400 points. “Arrey, the market players got bored when he talked about small change like Rs 50 crore or Rs 100 crore, so they started selling!”
How comforting for equity investors!
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