You might say I am nuts, but the best thing that could have happened to P. Chidambaram on budget day was a 600-point drop in the Sensex. Politics of the day demanded that Chidambaram should be seen to be hurting the rich. And he achieved just that, never mind the help from the Chinese, whose stock market fell the previous day, taking the rest of Asia down.

If you were in any doubt, this is the point he, being a politician (an elected one, unlike most of his party’s kautilyas who happen to be Rajya Sabha warriors), has been underlining ever since. The 1997 budget, he says, was about “another dream”, of unleashing Indian enterprise and that has more or less been achieved. This one was about distributing the spoils of that success. What he wouldn’t say is, every time industry complains of new and complicated taxes, the white collar worker protests about the tax on stock options, or some get their cheap thrills that the really rich will now have to pay a sizeable tax on planes they import (they may do no such thing, and register their planes in Dubai instead), he is vindicated in terms of his party’s current twisted politics. While on the one hand it celebrates the fact of 9 per cent growth, on the other it’s not sure if it makes a large enough section of its voters happy. So it has chosen a novel way of conducting its politics: celebrate the growth, but punish its beneficiaries — or at least be seen to be doing so.

... contd.