THERE was a time in India when the display of wealth and conspicuous consumption was frowned upon as an immorality associated with parvenu classes. Leaving food on the plate was similarly considered sinful. There were good reasons. Shiploads of wheat and milk powder were procured from the US under the PL480 deal paid for in rupees. Not being wasteful was also a way of teaching the young to be sensitive about the visitations of the manmade Bengal famine, triggered by the siphoning of food for Britain’s war effort.

The stock market too was seen as villainous, and it was censured persuasively in popular poetry and movies. Dev Anand’s Kaala Bazar, Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 and Dilip Kumar’s Footpath shone at the box office as successes that projected the lure of easy money as a social evil. Food adulteration and spurious medicines marketed by unscrupulous magnates were condemned as obstacles to nation building, as was the widespread stealing of the peasant’s land by moneylenders. Since Nehru fired his finance minister over allegations of corruption, levelled by his own son-in-law, the public was sanguine about the government’s probity. Ministers like Lal Bahadur Shastri set the bar high by example. He quietly resigned as railway minister owning responsibility for a fatal train accident, unthinkable today.

The budget was presented in the Lok Sabha at 5:30 pm in keeping with a British tradition. Its highlights came unhurriedly as headlines in the morning dailies. Yes, a day before the budget, cigarette shops would remove the more popular brands from the shelves and put them back at marginally higher prices a day later to accord with the new taxes. The overnight hoarding would fetch the vendors a small windfall. Likewise, suspending the sale of vegetables, dairy items, bread, etc. ahead of the budget would produce a small gain for the vendors. Police would raid ration shops if hoarding of essential commodities was suspected.

In the corridors of the parliament house, reams of budget papers were packed securely in unwieldy gunny bags weighing several kilos. As the finance minister finished the speech, couriers would line up with special tokens, would rush the sacks to the news editor’s room of business dailies or to the offices of magnates where expert teams pored over the fine print to take a quick profitable call.

The national budget presented on Feb 28, 2002, by the Vajpayee government underscored a tragic disconnect between the ruling elite and a troubled country.

Manmohan Singh’s embrace of the free market economy in 1991 tipped the social balance in favour of tycoons and punters who were until then kept on a short leash. Nehru had jailed the most prominent of business magnates. Indira Gandhi nationalised their banks, and Rajiv Gandhi forbade the lot against “riding on the backs of Congress workers”. Which explains the business-backed Narendra Modi’s call to rid the country of the Congress party. It also explains Rahul Gandhi’s persistence in projecting the underclass, the indebted peasants, the unemployed youth, students traumatised by a dubious system for competitive tests to professional colleges, and of course, runaway food prices, as areas needing urgent redress.

A curious feature of Manmohan Singh’s pro-business budgets and those of his successors has been that they were seldom discussed threadbare as budgets ought to be. The key reason was that Singh’s advent as a globally applauded economic wizard and L.K. Advani’s rise as a Hindutva rabble-rouser arrived intriguingly together.

In the run-up to the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, few noticed that the Rao government had bribed a group of MPs from Jharkhand to vote to pass Singh’s budget. The bribe-takers were later jailed but only after the completion of the pro-market Rao government’s term. The budget speech became more sacrosanct as it began to be televised to world markets. A debate on the budget, if any, hardly made it to the headlines.

The national budget presented on Feb 28, 2002, by the Vajpayee government underscored a tragic disconnect between the ruling elite and a troubled country. Involved TV discussion on the priorities for the markets led up to the finance minister’s speech. Both kept up the pretence until then as if nothing was happening in Gujarat, where mobs had a free run of towns and villages attacking Muslim shops and homes, raping and killing at will under the government’s nose. The moment the speech was over, the cameras panned to the billowing smoke in Ahmedabad, which was in fact set off very early in the morning.

Headlines anticipating today’s (Tuesday) budget were therefore unsurprising. The opposition would corner the government over two issues, they said, both unrelated to the budget. The spike in fatalities of troops in Jammu in clashes with armed men is on the agenda. The opposition says the encounters belie claims of normalcy in the Himalayan region the government claimed would come with the 2019 abrogation of Kashmir’s special status. The police chief has added fuel to the inferno, accusing pro-Delhi mainstream politicians of helping militants.

The second distraction for the opposition from the proposed budget is also not original. Shiva-worshipping kanwariyas, so-called for the two pots of sacred Ganga water they carry by foot to distant temples, do the pilgrimage this time of the year. Their march over several weeks through crowded cities like Delhi causes serious traffic disruptions. The BJP government in UP has made it worse.

Food vendors along the route were ordered to display their names so that the Hindu kanwariyas would not accidentally eat food from a non-Hindu vendor. The supreme court on Monday stalled the nefarious order, but the polarising fiat has done its bit for the ruling party ahead of crucial by-polls to the state legislature due later this year.

And so, the top one per cent of people, comprising India’s super-rich, continue to hold 53pc of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 50pc owns a miserable 4.1pc, and over 810 million people survive on five kilograms of free grain distributed by the government. Communalism is prospering, as are free market buccaneers.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2024