Pratap Bhanu Mehta is vice-chancellor of Ashoka University. He was earlier president, Centre Policy Research, New Delhi, one of India's top think tanks. Before he started engaging with contemporary affairs, he taught political theory at Harvard, and briefly at JNU. He has written extensively on intellectual history, political theory, law, India's social transformation and world affairs. He is the recipient of the Infosys Prize, the Adisheshiah Prize and the Amartya Sen Prize.
A Kamdhenu budget
Kamdhenu is the divine cow that fulfils all desires. This budget is, in the final analysis, an exercise in Kamdhenu miracle making: It seems to promise something for everyone. But the real secret of Kamdhenu is that there are no miracles.
The Union budget was presented against two anomalous circumstances. In the absence of the Economic Survey, and increasing doubts about what official GDP statistics mean, there was a less clear analytical context for the budget. Broadly speaking, the macroeconomic story in terms of inflation, current account deficit, and budget deficit looked stable on the surface. But the sense of underlying pessimism occasioned by the agrarian crisis and uncertainty over job creation was bound to cast a shadow over budget priorities. This sense of crisis is compounded by the political context. The budget comes barely weeks before the election. There is competition and one-upmanship on announcing new support schemes for a range of social groups. Given the Congress’s ambitious welfare announcements, it was widely expected that the government would respond in kind.
This was not just a budget: It was an election manifesto, and a tepid one at that.
In a curious way, this budget is not a triumph of the NDA as much as it is a moral victory for the UPA. This triumph is symbolically marked by one scheme: MGNREGA. The Modi government had come to power with a view that a scheme like the MGNREGA would be rendered irrelevant by Modinomics. The MGNREGA has been, for the BJP, a symbol of all that was wrong with the economy: The need for the MGNREGA was a sign of a larger economic failure, its presence distorted markets, and the solution was to do away with rural distress altogether. If we judge the BJP by its own yardstick, the fact that it ends the year with an increased allocation to the MGNREGA symbolically marks its own admission of failure. It is the visible totem of the fact that in terms of enhancing rural incomes, it broke no new ground.
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