<b>Aakar Patel:</b> The Budget speech as speech

The word fiscal has the same etymological root as fascist. There is to be some reduction in the deficit of the first. The second — fascism is “authoritarian, ultra-nationalist government and social organisation” — has not really seen any deficit in our times. The relationship between fiscus (“basket”) and fasces (“bundle”) could be argued over by pedants, and that would make for more interesting listening than the Budget speech telecast on Wednesday.

I do not mean the content, I hasten to add, because the full meaning of Budgets usually is revealed only in time. I mean the Budget speech as language and as rhetoric. I mean the use of words to communicate with clarity a government’s economic priorities, higher direction, and changes in approach. And also to introduce Indians to their balance sheet. The qualities required in a good budget, for example prudence (which was observable here), may well have been present in the numbers, but they were certainly absent in the speech. And so, as speeches go, this one was for me a dud.

This is for a few reasons.

Firstly, the language. There is no running away from English for the Budget speech, true, but it immediately makes the ritual foreign to the 95 per cent of Indians who either do not speak it or are familiar with it in pidgin. The finance minister’s interventions in Hindi came in the form of potted bits of poetry whose lyric and meter Mr Jaitley seemed unfamiliar with. Banal couplets were delivered awkwardly and without conviction.

And then I cannot be the only one to have noticed that Mr Jaitley radiates passive-aggressive vibes. He looks displeased when handing out sops. As a public speaker he is efficient without being empathetic. He does not have the charismatic brilliance of his boss, who, like Nehru, constantly delivers speeches without losing his freshness.

I want to compare Mr Jaitley’s speech to that of another finance minister’s from a generation ago.

Manmohan Singh is a singularly dull speaker, if one is looking not at content but at presentation. It is for this reason that his 1991 speech is so memorable.

Mr Singh’s Budget was delivered, like Mr Jaitley’s was, at an unusual time (I think it was July). It was also delivered, and its opening lines pay tribute, after the death of a parliamentarian, in this case, the leader of the Indian National Congress.

And it was a little over 150 paragraphs, fewer than Mr Jaitley’s 184.

I heard it live that evening. It must have been around 5 or 6pm as it was in those days and I remember stopping work and paying attention because it was clearly important stuff.

There is a didactic quality to that speech. I have long felt that speech should be made compulsory in school. Every few paragraphs we are told something important. What a fiscal deficit (it was eight per cent of GDP that year!) is and so on. He points out that defence, that holy cow which sucks out ten times more money than health, is our highest expense after interest. He describes the disease with such piercing clarity that when the medicine (40 per cent rise in fertiliser prices, 20 per cent hike in price of petrol) is offered it seems necessary.

Much of it is peppered with data that are meaningless today — though Indians will be amazed to see how far we have come in a quarter century if they compare the numbers. The whole thing is about 30 pages long.

And if the reader sticks around till the last page, she will receive a treat. For suddenly, out of nowhere, Mr Singh produces lyricism of the first rank. The language is shorn of cliché, and of stock phrase. Like the funeral oration of Pericles, it has a ringing quality. It goes:

“Sir, I have now nearly come to the end of my labour. Before I conclude, let me end on a personal note. Years ago, in a letter which Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to the young Indira Gandhi, he advised her that in dealing with the affairs of the State one should be full of sentiment but never be sentimental. But the House will forgive me if on an occasion like this I cannot avoid being somewhat sentimental.

“I was born in a poor family in a chronically drought-prone village which is now part of Pakistan. University scholarships and grants made it possible for me to go to college in India as well as in England. This country has honoured me by appointing me to some of the most important public offices of our sovereign Republic. This is a debt which I can never be able to fully repay. The best I can do is to pledge myself to serve our country with utmost sincerity and dedication. This I promise to the House. A Finance Minister has to be hard-headed. This I shall endeavour to be. I shall be firm when it comes to defending the interests of this nation. But I promise that in dealing with the people of India I shall be soft-hearted. I shall not in any way renege on our nation’s firm and irrevocable commitment to the pursuit of equity and social justice. I shall never forget that ultimately all economic processes are meant to serve the interests of our people. It is only through a commitment to social justice and the pursuit of excellence that we can mobilise the collective will of our people for development, to give it a high moral purpose and to keep alive the spirit of national solidarity. The massive social and economic reforms needed to remove the scourge of poverty, ignorance and disease can succeed only if backed by a spirit of high idealism, self-sacrifice and dedication.”

These are very high standards and the language, though lofty, in Mr Singh’s voice seems honest.

It remains the Budget speech against which all others must be measured. I don’t think there was any Urdu poetry in that one (there’s that reference from Victor Hugo about ideas whose time has come right at the end) and the Iqbal stuff came in later years, though I could be wrong.

The 1991 speech stands up to repeated reading today. For some reason, I doubt that will be said about Mr Jaitley’s Budget justifying demonetisation — “the biggest tax reform since independence” in his words — a quarter century from now.