The Hindu Business Line : Budget burlesque

THE British have a penchant for romanticising the most routine activities and happenings and investing them with historic significance. Thus, they have managed to invest with heavenly halo the creeping ivy and the mouldy growth on the walls of their ancient universities, change of house guards in front of the Buckingham Palace, the opening of Parliament, the fox hunt, the Bank of England, the (now discredited) Lloyds, and the British Museum. They are also adept at making the rest of the world swallow the sales pitch concerning them, making ordinary things assume an undeserved glitter and glamour and, in the bargain, converting them into an irresistible draw for tourists.

The miasma of mystique and mystery associated with Budget making is also one such gimmick they have successfully exported to their colonies. The picture of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain and the Finance Ministers in the Dominions on their way to Parliament clutching at the despatch box containing the Budget has for decades been mandatory for the media. The solemnity with which the Budget was presented as if it was the Lord's Gospel was also a British concoction. It was assumed that Heavens would fall with a calamitous crash unless the Budget speech was intoned on a particular day at a particular time. The Chancellor or the Finance Minister was out of the reach of everybody until the whole burlesque was over, lest the slightest detail of any of the proposals, however inconsequential, leaked out. Hugh Dalton, the British Chancellor of Exchequer in 1947, and R. K. Shanmukham Chetty, India's Finance Minister, in 1948, had to resign following premature mention in the press, which could have been intelligent guesswork, of some aspects of their Budgets.

We, in India, can take pride in adding our own innovative touches to a hoary harlequinade. The intermittent sipping of water from a glass has now become an unbreakable ritual which no Finance Minister dare break. Likewise, it is a must for every Finance Minister worth his salt to quote a few couplets, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, Esperanto, it does not matter, regardless of the context or their relevance. Then, of course, the most breath-taking act of bravery performed for the first time in 1999 and continuing since: Advancing the timing from 5 in the evening to 11 in the morning.

The Finance Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, deserves several rounds of loud applause for going farther than any of his predecessors in India or his counterparts elsewhere: Dispensing the Budget in easily digestible doses as a possible prelude to doing away with the darned drudgery altogether! Shabash!