Why Pranab Mukherjee was chosen to present the interim budget instead of P Chidambaram is not clear.
On January 24, the Cabinet Secretariat amended its list of council of ministers and allocated the finance ministry to External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee as his additional responsibility. That was the day when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went for the heart bypass surgery. Since then Mukherjee has been attending North Block daily and taking full responsibility of the finance ministry, a job he held almost 25 years ago.
While the Cabinet Secretariat has been prompt in reflecting this change in Mukherjee’s ministerial responsibilities on its website, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has not displayed similar promptness. Check the PMO website and you will notice that the finance ministry is still being shown as one of the many additional responsibilities of Manmohan Singh!
Now, this may be a simple clerical error on the part of those who maintain the prime minister’s website. But it also says a lot about Manmohan Singh’s ideas on how, in his view, the finance ministry should be run in the remaining months of the UPA government.
Immediately after the cabinet reshuffle in December 2008, that effected P Chidambaram’s shift from the finance ministry to the home ministry, there were reports that another reshuffle was in the offing and that the prime minister was looking for a suitable candidate to take independent charge of the finance ministry. It is now clear that Singh had no such thoughts.
He had promptly included finance ministry as his additional responsibility. Chidambaram was asked to field questions related to the finance ministry in Parliament while Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia was roped in to assist the prime minister in handling finance ministry-related policy issues.
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Finance ministry officials also got used to this idea. Official files were sent to the PMO for the prime minister’s clearance or comments, but Ahluwalia was always there to provide advice, consultation and guidance. A few finance ministry officials also felt that if Ahluwalia were a member of either the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha, even the task of fielding Parliamentary questions pertaining to the finance ministry would have been entrusted to the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.
This arrangement would have continued till the end of the tenure of the UPA government. It was almost certain then that the vote-on-account or the interim budget would be presented to Parliament by Manmohan Singh and no one else. But the problem arose when Singh had to go for a heart bypass surgery and it became clear that he would not be physically fit by February 16 to present the interim budget. The tricky question then was who should take on the additional responsibility of the finance ministry, since that would require the same person to present the interim budget.
Why wasn’t the additional responsibility of the finance ministry given to P Chidambaram? And why was Pranab Mukherjee chosen to take charge of the finance ministry in addition to his existing responsibility? The official explanation is that Mukherjee is the senior-most member of the Cabinet after the prime minister. So, the choice fell on Pranab Mukherjee. But it is also a fact that if the question was only one of presenting the interim budget, why couldn’t the same job be done by Chidambaram, the man who was in charge of the finance ministry for the last five years?
Clearly, choices were made. There may be speculation over who made those choices. But that these choices were made at almost the end of the government’s tenure and with only a few months to go before the general elections may have upset quite a few senior members of the party without pleasing anyone in particular. Pranab Mukherjee might wonder why the finance portfolio was not allocated to him immediately after the reshuffle in December. Chidambaram might feel that having presented five full budgets for the UPA government, it was only proper that he was given a chance to sum up the government’s economic achievements while presenting the interim budget on February 16.
The last interim budget was presented in the third week of January 2004 by Jaswant Singh who was then the finance minister in the Vajpayee government. That became controversial because the opposition political parties questioned the logic of convening a special session of Parliament without proroguing the immediately preceding winter session.
The interim budget to be presented on February 16 is not likely to be controversial. But it will be remembered for the interesting developments that preceded the choice of the man who will rise to present the UPA government’s interim budget.