Pranab Mukherjee’s speech was perhaps in keeping with his down to earth, bureaucratic approach to politics and public life. Not for him any flight of prose or hyperbole. His speech and the interim budget that it introduced was some what bland. One missed the Urdu verses of the PM and the Tamil poetry that embellished PC’s budgets. The best we got were quotes from Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Professor Amartya Sen. Very workmanlike. It was bland also for a more serious reason. This was the absence of even a single policy measure that the government may be contemplating to address India’s own economic downturn or the global recession. Given that India is expected to play an important role in the G-20 process, the speech could have included India’s own understanding of the causes of this serious global crisis and possible measures to address them. A recognition how it is affecting the Indian economy and possible measures to preserve jobs and sustain growth would be the least one would have expected.

Clearly then the UPA wants to go in to the next general elections on the basis of its past achievements, which it must think are sufficient to give it the needed electoral mileage rather than on the basis of what they propose to do if they were to return to power. This would have demonstrated an assurance and given the UPA an extra opportunity to take its economic program to the people. This opportunity has been lost. The reality could be that the ruling coalition, as clearly also the opposition, simply does not have a policy program or framework which it could present to the people at this stage. And in these days of shifting pre and post poll alliances it is perhaps imprudent to show ones hand lest it has to be completely negated because of pressures from future coalition partners. This of course is typical of political formations for whom remaining or getting into power is the soel objective. There is no consideration of the development or welfare agenda that would be served once power has been secured. I would rather go back to earlier times when there was some idealism and the attempt to show that power is but a means to serve the nation and achieve desirable goals.

... contd.