Replete with hollow assurances

In the Budget for 2011-12, the Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, gave ‘inclusion' a new twist by expanding its ambit. So far, the word connoted an unacknowledged acceptance of policy failure and a desire for corrective action.

Inclusion's alter ego was not exclusion, but marginalisation, that consisted of a range of deprivations, from bank access to water and, of course, governance. For six years after the former finance minister in UPA-1 introduced the word into his Budget in recognition of the vast numbers huddled in India's hinterlands, inclusion has been used as a relish to spice up the otherwise empty fare dished out by policy planners for these complex times.

INCLUSION REDEFINED

Mr Mukherjee's sixth Budget is unique in its inclusivity: By catering to almost every stakeholder in the economy, including the very senior citizen as well as the very serious, such as ‘Green' activists, he lent a post-modern touch to the term.

In his sweeping ‘generosity' that ranged from a status quo on excise for manufactured goods to a raft of measures for the farm sector with a brief bow to accountability, there was none of the angst or regret at the way the gravy train had bypassed the Dirty and Unwashed.

He was not dealing with the marginalised alone or an India split into two separate countries; in his scheme of things, there are no debts to be paid by anyone, corporate rich and the salaried individual do not have to subsidise the poor through higher personal taxes or excise duties; fuel prices remain unchanged; even art connoisseurs have been embraced by the warm glow of fiscal concessions. And, for the first time in years, the agriculture sector comes in for treatment not witnessed in recent times.

What does the Budget tell us about the government? Unlike the more narrow use of inclusion by the RBI or other policymakers, that measures the extent of failed government vis-à-vis the Nehruvian notion of social compact, Mr Mukherjee's ‘universalist' Budget expresses the urgent need to appease the perceptions of an articulate middle class — namely, that almost every ill besetting the nation — ‘Maoist' insurgencies, corruption and, of course, inflation, not to mention the rising fiscal deficit — are the result of New Delhi's inability to rule well.

The current Budget's inclusivity seeks approbation for New Delhi's capacity to pull the whole nation together. The Budget echoes a shifting rhetoric, best articulated by the Prime Minister whose learned gravitas and measured, if toneless, homilies at various forums attempt to expand the limits of his government's capability even as events prove otherwise.

UNCONVINCING RHETORIC

Opening the Budget session of Parliament, Dr Singh once asserted his government's intention to ensure that inflation control did not hurt growth. As in the past, his interventions came long after the nation had gone through some restless agitation over New Delhi's failure to match practice to promise, word and deed. The RBI and the North Block still insist that monetary tightening would not hurt growth, when, in fact, interest rate spikes have created an environment of uncertainty among investors.

All through last year, one policymaker after another, from the Prime Minister himself to his Economic Advisory Council, the RBI and the Finance Ministry, promised a drop in inflation to reasonable levels — some said December, others March. Now we have Mr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, without batting an eyelid, telling an audience: “We can bring inflation under control and we will.”

The appeasement almost begins to cross over into farce. With its record muddied thick by corruption, black money, and allegations of illegal transfer of funds, the Finance Minister can still muster up the right level of indignation to get tough with tax havens that do not share transaction data. Earlier, the Prime Minister had thundered that the guilty in the CWG or 2G scandals would be punished, but only after the media and the Opposition had raised a storm.

For UPA-II, words have the ability to change or alter reality. The irony is that at one time its supreme self-confidence to steer the most privileged sections in the organised economy to higher levels of profits and purchasing power and swell GDP numbers, did work.

But now, the eagerness with which policymakers bandy solutions to correct the nation's deeply-flawed economic and political structures do not just sound hollow; they appear farcical in the context of a general collapse of codes of behaviour, which in turn can be traced to collective hubris — and now, a growing sense of panic.

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