New Delhi, July 07: He couldn’t have been nervous, but it could only have been nerves. The Lok Sabha is too effectively aid-conditioned to allow outbreaks of sweat so Pranab Mukherjee’s repeated application of the kerchief to his brow during his 100-minute budget oration gave many cause for consternation.
The House this morning was commodiously chilled of temperature and unusually rapt of temper, only Mukherjee seemed to sense heat. His forehead was constantly dehydrating, his hands constantly reaching out for repair and re-hydration.
He couldn’t have been nervous. Here was a man who’d first presented the national finance bill in 1982. His predecessor, P. Chidambaram, hadn’t even earned his legal spurs in Madras High Court at that time, much less grown political gums. His Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, was reporting to him as governor of the Reserve Bank.
If there was a past master of the game around in the Lok Sabha today, it had to be Pranab Mukherjee. Indeed, the House sat verily in awe of the man through most of it, like they were at class and some eminence was pronouncing.
The near uninterrupted run the finance minister had almost intimated a silent consensus that only fools would dare such authority at Pranab Mukherjee’s. There were a few anonymous grunts of protest from the back, and Lalu Prasad did get up to question or to contradict at one point, but he wasn’t able to proceed enough for us to know what it was that he was attempting. A wave of the hand and a mild professorial admonition and the king of bluster begged off.
Yet, there were moments when Mukherjee seemed bedevilled by debutant butterflies — flipping over a critical section on concessions to minorities, looking nervously askance at unintelligible interruptions from the back benches, gripping his lectern hard, as if for assurance as he bore on.
He could have been nervous, but only in the manner of a conductor recalled to lead a philharmonic concert after a quarter of a century of banishment from the music.
That’s how long it has been since Pranab Mukherjee last presented a budget. As he said later, smiling jowl to jowl, visibly relieved it was over: “So much has changed since then, nearly everything.”
In 1984, he smoked a pipe and puffed planning and public sector. In the intervening period came a man called Manmohan Singh and blithely blew most of that away and altered the very fundamentals of how finance ministers work — or are meant to.
Any coincidence that Mukherjee quoted many from Kautilya to Gandhi to Indira to Manmohan Singh himself today, and left Jawaharlal Nehru, architect of planned socialist economy and traditionally fashionable deity in Congress precincts, out? Things have changed since he last drafted a budget -- it doesn’t do to quote Nehru and the global economic downturn just about afforded that deftly sneaked compliment to Indira Gandhi’s bank nationalisation.
Here was an expert practitioner of the thankless art of budgets, of course, but here too was a man who probably thought he was having to prove himself all over again, feeling the glare of scrutiny, seeking to measure up.
No finance minister, after all, has been tasked to work to a publicly stated template. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did that soon after starting his second term with an open diktat on aims and expectations.
Pranab Mukherjee could have felt watched over by the turbaned presence to his extreme left, that may have brought on the beads of sweat.
