Budget 2014: How Jaitley beat Chidu, Pranab with sheer word power

The unique feature of  Arun Jaitley’s maiden NDA budget was not its content, but its sheer length. It beat by a mile any budget speech by P Chidambararm or Pranab Mukherjee under UPA-2, and left the even longer speeches of two of his NDA predecessors in North Block – Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh, finance ministers in the Vajpayee government of 1998-2004 - as also-rans. Jaitley’s speech went on and on, punctuated with one just break of five minutes prompted by the minister’s own exhaustion. His speech was 16,536 words long – beating Yashwant Sinha’s best effort, the 2002-03 budget with 15,882 words, and Jaswant Singh’s 15,081 hollow. The best effort by the UPA came in 2012-13 – Pranab Mukherjee’s swansong budget - where he struggled to cross 14,000 words (he managed 14,157). Sixteen thousand plus will surely rank among India’s longest budget speeches. People heard Jaitley out patiently for the simple reason that this was his first budget, and everyone wanted to hear it till the end in the hope that something big will emerge. It didn’t. But nothing bad emerged either. [caption id=“attachment_1613147” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  P Chidambaram and Arun Jaitley. Agencies.[/caption] The question is: why did Jaitley need to make such a long speech? One clue could be his boss: this budget had to reflect Narendra Modi’s pet themes. There were so many of them that there was no way to avoid a boring speech alleviated only by a health break. Jaitley delivered the rest of his speech sitting down. Consider the sheer number of things that had to be put in on behalf of his boss, his themes, and elements of the Gujarat model. For example, the term neo middle class. It was dished out in the BJP Gujarat manifesto issued before the 2012 assembly polls. Neo made its appearance in the very first para of Jaitley’s speech. Then, the BJP campaign theme, Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, surfaced in para five. Granted, budget speeches have to reflect the political priorities of the party in power, especially if the party has just come to power and wants to let the world know it has arrived. Add a superboss with his own ideas and Jaitley had no option but to soldier on with the yak-yak. Next on the list of major themes was the idea of smart cities (which received Rs 7,000-and-odd crore in its very first airing) and urban investments and industrial corridors. Then we had the secular and cultural messaging – the Ganga clean-up, inter-linking of rivers, religious tourism circuits, et al. All came with their inevitable acronyms. Thus there was Hriday - the National Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana - with Rs 200 crore to spend on “conserving and preserving the heritage characters” of five religious places - Mathura, Amritsar, Gaya, Kanchipuram, Vellankani and Ajmer. The choice is secular - two Hindu places, one Sikh, one Christian and one Muslim. The Buddhist circuit around Gaya got its own scheme. Apart from the Ganga, Jaitley had more clean-up acts to announce: the Swatch Bharat Abhiyan – a plan to **“**cover every household with total sanitation by the year 2019, the 150th year of the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi…”. Another Modi slogan that got more than a look-in from Jaitley was the welfare of the girl child. Modi’s Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana got Rs 100 crore. Not enough to bachao or padhao all betis of India, but no harm in making a start. And who could forget Modi’s gigantic plan for a statue of Sardar Patel in Gujarat – set to be the world’s tallest. During the campaign, Modi had called for the collection of waste iron pieces from all over the country, to be melted and used to build this Statue of Unity.  But a little cash from the central budget can obviously help build unity. Jaitley slipped in Rs 200 crore for the Iron Man of India’s steel frame. A national war memorial and a national police memorial got Rs 100 crore and Rs 50 crore. The BJP always has a special relationship with men in arms, and Modi made it a point to allocate money for memorials for the valorous dead. But it was not Modi alone who had to be pleased. The BJP-Sangh Parivar icons who needed to be extolled and placed on the same pedestal as the Nehru-Gandhi ones could not be left out. Thus we had the Syama Prasad Mookerji Rurban Mission. The folks at North Block apparently had not heard much about this BJP icon, for they managed to misspell his name in the budget papers as Shyama Prasad Mukherji. Mixing the Sangh icon and Gujarat model together, Jaitley also announced the Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana to offer 24x7 power to rural areas by bifurcating the subsidised feeder lines from commercial lines. The Sangh, obsessed about the conversion of tribals by missionaries, got a tithe from Jaitley with Rs 100 crore being earmarked for the Van Bandhu Kalyan Yojana. Jaitley clearly had a lot to put into his speech. But if brevity is the soul of wit, verbosity is the bane of budget documents. He should try a shorter speech on 28 February 2015.