Uncharitable tussle
BURIED in the voluminous Finance Bill is a minor amendment to the Income Tax Act that is waiting to explode into a major controversy. The Congress has already fired the first shot on Thursday, more to test the waters than to declare hostility.

What about transparency?
THAT the sacking of the former chief of the Indian Navy, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, would give sleepless nights to the Government is not a surprising development.

In State, as in Centre
WHAT the Home Minister, Mr Lal Krishan Advani, had said about the blackmailing of the government by the minor alliance partners with three or four MPs cannot be false in the case of the states.

Budget that promises a lot
by Nitish Sengupta
THE truth is that I am neither overjoyed nor disappointed with Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha’s Budget for the year 1999-2000.

Thrust on social sectors
by K. P. Singh
A GOOD thing about Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha’s second budget is its political acceptability. Except for the one rupee levy on diesel, the Budget contains nothing that can be rejected outright. It is heartening to find that the Finance Minister is firm on his resolve not to roll back the levy, for it is a vital ingredient of the Budget.

The Congress fiasco
over Bihar
by Tavleen Singh
THAT most Indian political journalists detest the Bharatiya Janata Party is a given fact. Most of us come intellectually from another stratosphere and cannot begin to comprehend what the party stands for with its peculiar emphasis on things like religion and culture when, according to us of liberal persuasion, they should be concentrating on economics and politics. So, out of our basic prejudice has come much deliberate misinterpretation of political events ever since Atal Behari Vajpayee became Prime Minister.

Of Budget blues and Lahore
by Amita Malik
THOSE of us who were watching TV last week — and who wasn’t? — just could not get away from two events, the aftermath of the bus to Lahore and Yashwant Sinha’s marathon budget performance. There were long wrap-ups of the visit to Lahore, as apart from the bus. Star News seems to have sent a battalion of reporters to dig out every possible story and some of them scored heavily on the social and cultural front.

75 Years Ago

Missing cabinet ministers
CALCUTTA: The following telegram has been received by the Japanese Consul-General at Simla, which was originally received by the Guarding Squadron at Amoy at 7 p.m. on February 24.

Uncharitable tussle

BURIED in the voluminous Finance Bill is a minor amendment to the Income Tax Act that is waiting to explode into a major controversy. The Congress has already fired the first shot on Thursday, more to test the waters than to declare hostility. The Bill proposes to allow all charitable trusts to spend up to 5 per cent of the donations they receive on religious activities. The justification, a patently specious one, goes like this. Most trusts are formed and function on the basis of religious tenets and hence do some religion-oriented work. Why not allow them to dip into their general revenue? The genesis of this sudden gesture of generosity lies in a ruling of the Supreme Court. Recently it said that any trust which spends any money on any religious activity is not entitled to income tax concession available under Section 80 G. (This section actually helps the donor, and not directly the trust, to claim total exemption from payment of tax.) The Preamble to the Constitution declares India as a secular republic, thus forcing the state to keep off any religious obligation and Article 27 makes this abundantly clear. The amendment will simply overrule the court injunction. The court may yet strike down the amendment, but that is for tomorrow.

The Congress reads a communal meaning into the change proposed in the IT Act. It accuses the BJP-led government of conniving with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal to divert a part of the huge donations they receive from abroad to step up their activities which have attracted much flak in recent months. The party sees a direct link between the proposed concession and the repeated public assertion of the two Hindutva outfits to launch a crusade against conversion to Christianity. The umbilical chord which unites all members of the Sangh Parivar is one supporting evidence. The second is the absence of any request from the charitable trusts of other religious communities for a similar sop. The Congress is going to raise the issue in Parliament but it cannot have its way given the numbers in the Lok Sabha. A cut motion, the time-tested way to disapprove of any budget provisions and bring down the government, may fail, as seen from the 271-votes-against-250-votes passage of the motion to impose central rule in Bihar. The Rajya Sabha has no power to defeat a money Bill. But the cut motion could become life-threatening if one or two regional parties come round to share the sentiments, as the TDP and AIADMK might do. In that case the amendment may be stillborn, quite in keeping with the rollback tradition.

What about transparency?

THAT the sacking of the former chief of the Indian Navy, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, would give sleepless nights to the Government is not a surprising development. In fact, Defence Minister George Fernandes should have been prepared to answer questions related to the unceremonious dismissal of Admiral Bhagwat during the Budget Session of Parliament. Instead, a clumsy attempt is being made to keep the issue under wraps because “It involves national security”. What is surprising is the fact that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has taken the initiative of holding discussions with the floor leaders of the Rajya Sabha on why they should not raise the issues related to the sacking of the former Navy chief. The Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition is said to be feeling uncomfortable following Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s permission to move a censure motion on the issue against the Government in the two Houses of Parliament. Mr Fernandes, Parliamentary Affairs Minister P.R. Kumaramangalam, Mr Manmohan Singh, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, Mr Amar Singh (Samajwadi Party) and Mr Balanandan (CPM) were among those who attended the meeting called by the Prime Minister. During the meeting Mr Fernandes is said to have shown classified documents to the Opposition leaders in a desperate effort to talk them out of raising in Parliament the issue of Admiral Bhagwat’s sacking. Mr Fernandes is a seasoned leader. He should know the difference between sharing sensitive information with the House and sharing it with the representatives of the people in the office of the Prime Minister.

Is it to be presumed that sharing classified information with the law-makers in a forum constituted for this purpose amounts to putting at risk the security of the nation? However, sharing the same information with the members outside the House does not amount to putting the nation’s security at risk! A lot of dirty linen has already been washed in public ever since the former Navy chief was shown the door. Newspapers and magazines have conducted their own “investigations” and have taken contradictory positions on the sacking of Admiral Bhagwat. A section of the media has even tried to give the unpleasant episode a communal colour. Questions have been raised about Mr Fernandes’ “personal interest” in the sacking of the former Navy chief. All that can be said has already been said on the issue and at the end of it all there are questions which still remain unanswered. For instance what is the role of the international arms lobby in the appointment and promotion (in the case of Admiral Bhagwat even sacking) of senior officers in the armed forces? In any case, both Mr Vajpayee and Mr Fernandes need to be reminded that without transparency of action and accountability to the legislature parliamentary democracy cannot survive for long. An action which cannot be explained to Parliament “in the national interest” is an action which should never have been taken. The better course would be to lay all the facts on the table of the House and let the law-makers decide whether they want an open debate on the issue of the sacking of Admiral Bhagwat.

In State, as in Centre

WHAT the Home Minister, Mr Lal Krishan Advani, had said about the blackmailing of the government by the minor alliance partners with three or four MPs cannot be false in the case of the states. The general trend is visible in Himachal Pradesh nowadays where the Bharatiya Janata Party is in power courtesy the Himachal Vikas Congress (HVC) of the redoubtable Mr Sukh Ram. The government of Mr Prem Kumar Dhumal was earlier of the opinion that it was on a firmer ground than the Central Government because two MLAs of the HVC had migrated to the BJP as a tactical move lest the Congress managed a split in the ranks of the HVC. It is for these services rendered that they were duly made Ministers. But his hopes have been dashed by these Ministers themselves who have made it clear that their party hopping was only a “stage-managed act” and they continue to belong to the HVC. That this ugly episode was indeed stage-managed was known to everybody. But the way the lead actors have owned it takes one’s breath away. Obviously, they find nothing wrong in using the label of one party and continuing to owe allegiance to another. That shows the depths to which public morality has sunk. Mr Sukh Ram of the currency suitcases fame continues to call it a masterstroke. Unfortunately, others cannot really see it that way, try as they might. For them, it will remain a classic stroke of chicanery.

Whatever it is, the fact remains that the warning of the Ministers has rattled the BJP government in the state and has made it realise how precarious its position is. The party clings to power with a microscopic thread and Mr Sukh Ram continues to hold the scissors’ hand. But that does not mean that he will yield the instrument easily. He is a shrewd politician and knows that his bargaining power will be diminished if he dumps the BJP and tries to attempt another of his “masterstrokes” with the Congress. Even if Mr Virbhadra Singh and other Congress leaders are keen to see the back of Mr Dhumal, they are fully aware how slippery a customer the former Telecom Minister can be. Even otherwise, there is a strong feeling in the Congress against about re-inducting Mr Sukh Ram. The party president, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, is also said to be opposed to the “homecoming” of the former Minister who is bound to bring with him all the taint. As such, his threats are likely to be more for the sake of extracting more benefits (read prize postings and transfers for the party sympathisers) than any precipitate action. In normal times, this kind of blackmailing may cause extreme revulsion but the recent experiments in the formation of coalition governments and their subsequent “stabilisation” through means more foul than fair have made the country numb to the unethicality of it all. If one were to read the tea leaves, it would seem that the visit of some trouble-shooter like Mr George Fernandes to the cool confines of Shimla is on the cards, rather than any precipitate action by the HVC. Stagecraft is the stuff Statecraft is made of nowadays.

Budget that promises a lot
by Nitish Sengupta

THE truth is that I am neither overjoyed nor disappointed with Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha’s Budget for the year 1999-2000. First of all, I must congratulate him for breaking with the old colonial practice of starting the Budget speech at 5 p.m. which was introduced by our British rulers to coincide it with the starting of the operation at the London Stock Exchange with around 5 hours time differential. It is amazing that for 50 years, we had blindly followed that colonial tradition, and it was great of the Finance Minister to at last move away from it. I should also congratulate him for using the word “Privatisation” which remained “a sacred cow” for our policy makers all these years. However, it remains to be seen whether he can really break new grounds by pursuing a bold policy of disinvestment of government holdings in public enterprises through the stock market rather than have the kind of incestuous arrangement that has been there this year through the IOC and the ONGC, surely helping the government in bridging its deficit gap.

I congratulate the Finance Minister for his many bold promises and expressions of intent. Some of the striking positive features are the welcome rationalisation of the indirect tax structure (particularly, the proposed Modvat arrangements), a significant increase in the outlays of defence, agriculture and education, the proposals for exempting UTI schemes from income tax, the proposed changes in the capital gains tax, providing a clear incentive for investing in the capital market. He made welcome announcements for a joint operation by the Department of Company Affairs and the Securities and Exchange Board of India against the unscrupulous and dishonest company promoters (one wishes that greedy merchant bankers had also been included in this group), a 74 per cent automatic equity route for foreign pharmaceutical companies, the extension of Section 80 HHC benefits to the entertainment industry, for boosting the growth of information technology, tax-free status to municipal bonds, tax initiatives to promote housing, setting up the Watershed Development Fund and the Kisan Credit Card scheme for 20 lakh farmers.

But, unfortunately, there are too many promises and little concrete proposals to back up. There is no doubt that the carrots provided for the capital market investors are attractive. But in the current scenario, the overwhelming impression is one of this despondency and gloom in the industrial sector caused by severe demand recession. The Budget does not hold much promise that the government will do anything spectacular to combat this demand recession. But the initial reactions of stock brokers and industrialists showed that they misjudged this situation. There is a spurt in sensex, and a deep recession is the single biggest problem facing Indian industry. And the Budget has done practically nothing to address itself to the problem. If this recession continues unabated, industrial production will fall further, impacting our GDP adversely. The Budget contains no special package for arresting demand recession, nor is there anything drastic for promoting investment in general and in the infrastructure sector in particular. The structural changes in the Central excise and customs structure are welcome. In particular, the provision for 100 per cent “Modvating” will be liked by many in industry.

While the proposed surcharge on the corporate and income tax rates would not please many, this cannot but be taken as unexceptionable keeping in view the imperative need to raise resources to reduce the galloping deficit. It is also good that the Finance Minister has repeatedly emphasised his faith in raising revenues through widening the tax net, better compliance and better tax administration. In that light one hopes that the Finance Minister has promised to set up an Expenditure Commission. But such commissions have been set up in the past also, and everybody knows that setting up of a commission is the surest way of ensuring that nothing serious gets done within a short time.

He has spoken of reducing four posts of Secretary to the Government of India. That is woefully inadequate. One can list out a series of ministries and offices which are left without any function after deregulation and can be wound up. Even if their employees were to be allowed to draw their salaries without coming to their offices, the government could effect substantial economy. There is great scope for retaining them and redeployment. Unfortunately, all Finance Ministers in the decade of reforms have failed to give any direction, and Mr Sinha is no exception.

A Budget has two aspects: economics and politics. The economic intricacies are manifold, and the results of the steps suggested become visible months after these are introduced. But the political aspects become visible sooner, just like the recent rise in the prices of essential commodities of daily use, which brought about the downfall of the BJP government in the elections for the Delhi Assembly.

In its election manifesto last year the BJP had promised to raise the exemption limit on personal income tax from Rs 40,000 then prevalent to Rs 60,000. In the previous year’s Budget it was raised to only Rs 50,000. It is obvious that there are financial/economic compulsions of running a government. By taking the step of imposing a surcharge of 10 per cent on incomes above Rs 60,000, the BJP government has not only gone back on its promise made at the time of elections but has also taken a step in the opposite direction, which the electorate will not appreciate, whatever the economic and political compulsions. The electorate will record its verdict at the time of the next elections to Parliament.

Nearly all Opposition parties, including the Congress, have been quick in finding faults with the Budget proposals. Even the BJP’s allies in the coalition have started recording their dissatisfaction with some of the tax proposals. A little horse-trading at this time can lure away some of the allies in the coalition government, which has been doing tight-rope walking, placating different leaders of such groups.

Some people have frowned upon the exemption of all incomes derived from the investment in UTI schemes, about which the directive given in the Budget speech seems ambiguous. While in one sentence declaring “all incomes derived from UTI being exempt from income tax”, it has been added elsewhere that this concession will not apply to the monthly income schemes of the UTI. It has also not been made absolutely clear whether the concession of exemption of Rs 3,000 as interest from the UTI under Section 80-L in addition to the general exemption under that Section of Rs 12,000, has also been withdrawn. The UTI, under the shadow of such a doubt, has already withheld its new monthly income scheme which was to be launched with effect from April 1, 1999. It is time the Finance Minister came up with a fresh statement on the floor of the House to clarify such doubts in the minds of the intending investors in UTI schemes and the officers running that organisation.

In some circles, dissatisfaction has been expressed on lowering the rate of interest on PPF and monthly income schemes of post offices. Mostly retired persons invest in such schemes. Their income has been reduced by the lowering of interest rates, on the one hand, and imposing a 10 per cent surcharge on incomes above Rs 60,000. This dissatisfaction will increase with the impending rise in the prices of commodities of daily use due to the raise in the price of diesel.

In the face of the dissatisfaction/ opposition expressed so far, the government may relent on some of the steps suggested in the Budget. The Finance Minister has treated the fixed income groups like, to use his own phrase, “Hum Aap Ke Hain Kaun”, and with the possibility of a mid-term election, tried to appease the agricultural lobby to strengthen its party’s vote bank in the rural areas.

Finally, one is struck by many gaps in the figures relating to the structure of the Budget. One wonders why the Finance Ministry could not provide notching figures in the context of revenue proposals in many instances. One glaring inconsistency is the Finance Minister’s faux pas in excluding the small savings figures while computing the public debt for purposes of calculating the fiscal deficit. The promise to continue with the second phase of economic reforms is not matched by enough and concrete measures proposed in the Budget.

The writer is Director, International Management Institute, and a former Revenue Secretary

Thrust on social sectors
by K. P. Singh

A GOOD thing about Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha’s second budget is its political acceptability. Except for the one rupee levy on diesel, the Budget contains nothing that can be rejected outright. It is heartening to find that the Finance Minister is firm on his resolve not to roll back the levy, for it is a vital ingredient of the Budget. The Budget also shows a perspective unlike his previous one, which is that an economy cannot really grow without empowering the poor in a democracy. The influence of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is clearly evident. The thrust on the social sectors is welcome. The sharp focus of the Budget on the revival of the rural economy through the panchayati raj mechanism is innovative and praiseworthy. If successful, this will widen the market for industrial goods and lead to the emergence of a vibrant and prosperous India. Implementation of the schemes will play a crucial role. In many states, the panchayats as an institution are yet to take roots. The Finance Minister has now provided incentives to the state governments to build them.

It is clear that the Finance Minister has taken a medium term view and has announced some steps to prepare the economy for global integration. As he said, India could not live in isolation and must integrate itself with the rest of the world. The Budget has tried to provide a framework for it. That framework will probably work in three to four years, but the problem is that the Finance Minister or the government may not last long in the current political environment. The concern is about immediate future, for who knows what is in store for tomorrow?

The Indian industry’s reaction to the Budget has been mixed, and understandably so. The Finance Minister has not really tried to tackle any of the three major ailments plaguing the economy: widening fiscal deficit, industrial recession and negative export growth. The Economic Survey, released three days before Mr Sinha presented his Budget, has strongly emphasised the need for fiscal consolidation, without which neither inflation can be controlled nor can interest rates be brought down. The survey has suggested the elimination of low priority expenditure and non targeted subsidies, reversal of the decline in the tax GDP ratio and downsizing of the government.

The Finance Minister has not tried to tackle any of these issues. Probably the compulsions of coalition politics have prevented him from taking any serious steps on this front. So he has had to take the easier option of raising tax rates to mobilise more revenue to meet the government’s ever enlarging expenditure. By basing his estimate on the new series of GDP statistics and excluding small savings, Mr Sinha has been able to show a fiscal deficit of only 4 per cent of the GDP for the next year, and 4.4 per cent for the current financial year. But as calculations show, the real fiscal deficit on the basis of old GDP series and the inclusion of small savings would be 6 per cent of the GDP for 1999-2000. This means that no fiscal correction has been attempted except for raising the taxes.

The wisdom of raising more revenue by hiking direct tax rates when industry is in recession has naturally been questioned by some sections of the Indian corporate sector. Ironically, however, the Finance Minister has based his estimates of revenue on the hypothesis that there will be an industrial recovery. This is a highly questionable assumption, to say the least.

The Finance Minister is probably assuming that the simplification of the Customs and excise duty structure combined with the move towards the value added taxation, and the tax incentives for mutual funds will revive the share market, which in turn will provide cheap funds for investments in the private sector. It is also true that following the presentation of the Budget, the Bombay sensitive index jumped by 166 points, a record. But the buoyancy is likely to be shortlived, and it can be sustained only when there is an industrial recovery. The market’s positive reaction to the Budget was perhaps because the expectation was for harsh steps which are not there.

The Indian industry expects a softening of interests rate which is possible only when the government can keep its revenue deficit under control so that market borrowing is less. But the Finance Minister has left it to the RBI Governor to decide. If indeed, the RBI Governor obliges Mr Sinha, investments will go up, coming on top of a widening fiscal deficit, and increase imports and widen the external payments gap.

The Budget assumes an industrial recovery based on export growth, but has done very little for the export sector. The hope is that the depreciation of the rupee will be enough to trigger export growth. It is possible that the Finance Minister believes that export growth would not take place anyway until there is recovery in the global economy, and therefore, nothing much need be done. That is why the Commerce Minister, Mr R.K. Hegde, is unhappy, and has already described the Budget as directionless.

The revenue estimates are on the high side. Ironically enough, the estimates are the new definition. The gross revenue is projected to go up by 19 per cent, including a 20 per cent increase in excise and 18 per cent jump in customs collections. Excise and customs account for nearly two thirds of the aggregate tax revenue. But the buoyancy in revenue collections is there when the industries are doing well, not when they are facing recession.

The Indian industry was hoping for a significant jump in spending on infrastructure. But such hopes have been belied. The Plan outlay has been placed at 17 per cent more than the compressed outlay in 1998-99. But even if there are revenue shortfalls, it ends up being smaller than what was initially budgeted for 1998-99. The 1998-99 Budget had provided for a 3.5 per cent increase in public investment in the core sectors of energy, transport, and communications to revive the economy. But according to the revised estimates, the investment in the core sectors is turning out to be 15 per cent less than the budgeted amount. There is no guarantee that the last year’s story will not be repeated, and that the Finance Minister will be able to keep his commitment of the rise in revenue expenditure to only Rs 7200 crore in 1999-2000. The axe then will fall on capital expenditure to create problems for the remaining years of the Ninth Plan, and the Indian economy will be heading for a low growth regime.

(The author is the President of Assocham)

The Congress fiasco over Bihar

by Tavleen Singh

THAT most Indian political journalists detest the Bharatiya Janata Party is a given fact. Most of us come intellectually from another stratosphere and cannot begin to comprehend what the party stands for with its peculiar emphasis on things like religion and culture when, according to us of liberal persuasion, they should be concentrating on economics and politics. So, out of our basic prejudice has come much deliberate misinterpretation of political events ever since Atal Behari Vajpayee became Prime Minister. The most outstanding example of this is the impression we have managed to create in the public mind that this is the worst government in the history of independent India.

Most senior political reporters in Delhi have lived through seriously troubled times brought about by bad governance. The Emergency Operation Bluestar, the beginnings of secession in Kashmir, terrible communal violence and a long list of similar political disasters but I cannot recall anyone thinking, at any of these times, that the world was coming to an end. With the BJP government, on the other hand, despite there having been few political disasters on the above scale we have been foretelling tales of doom from day one with the result that the average newspaper reader has been convinced that Mr Vajpayee cannot govern.

Even keeping all this in mind, though, it is hard to understand the deliberate misreporting of the Bihar fiasco that was the Congress Party’s welcome home gift to Mr Vajpayee when he returned from his brilliant peace initiative in Lahore. What happened over the imposition of President’s rule in Bihar was more of a fiasco for Congress than for the BJP but you wouldn’t know it from the reporting of it in most of our major newspapers.

Nor would you be able to discover that the real reason why Congress decided, after complaining endlessly about the Bihar government, not to support its dismissal was that the Congress is now ready to topple Mr Vajpayee’s government as soon as it can.

This is something I learned from senior Congress leaders after returning from Lahore. “What is behind our decision not to support President’s rule” said a former cabinet minister “is the fact that we have now decided to pave the way for elections. We don’t want them to be held immediately but we would like to replace this government with one put together by the Yadavs and the Left with our support from the outside. We feel this will make us look even better by the time elections are held.”

In other words what we are seeing is a cynical political game in play. Defence Minister George Fernandes exposed it brilliantly in the Lok Sabha when he read at length from a document detailing the misdeeds of the Bihar government. When MPs badgered him to identify the document he finally said, to the acute embarrassment of Opposition benches, that he was reading from the Congress Party manifesto. Only one Delhi newspaper bothered to report his speech in full describing the discomfiture it caused.

The Congress ended up with so much egg on its face that no sooner had it announced its decision to oppose the dismissal of the Bihar government than it was obliged to put its senior leaders on television to clarify that this did not mean that they wanted Rabri Devi to remain chief minister. By the time they had finished with their clarifications there was as much confusion about Congress views on Bihar as there had been before they got started.

Neither Tariq Anwar nor Pranab Mukherjee, who were the two I watched, were able to explain exactly what Congress wanted in Bihar.

This is because the Congress has taken an uptenable position in the first place which is best seen in the fact that the party’s Bihar unit has been in open revolt against the ‘high command’ ever since it announced its decision to oppose President’s rule.

Even if the massacres in Jehanabad had not brought things to a head there has been a case for President’s rule in Bihar ever since Laloo Yadav decided to hand power to his semi-literate wife more than a year ago. Having had the uncertain pleasure of spending two days in the company of Rabri Devi in Patna I can say with authority that she has been nothing more than a token chief minister. Throughout the time I was with Mr and Mrs: Laloo Yadav a stream of ministers and officials poured into the Chief Minister’s residence and there was not a single one who had anything to discuss with her. They made a beeline for an outhouse, behind the main residence, in whose verandah Laloo held court. When a law and order problem occurred in Biharsharif it was he who got on the telephone to local officials and instructed them on what they should do. She sat quietly beside him like the dutiful wife she is and allowed him to do what he liked.

During the interview I did with her she had barely anything coherent to say about political or economic matters. Even when she had been supplied with statistics — as for instance on the law and order situation — she managed to muddle them up so that she ended up saying the opposite of what she was meant to. Perhaps, her most telling remark was that her life had not changed at all since she became chief minister except for the few hours a day she spent signing files.

In Patna her status as a token chief minister is well known. In the street interviews I did with ordinary people the majority said they believed it was wrong for Laloo to have imposed his wife he on Bihar the way he had. Could he find no other leader in his party to whom he could have handed over instead?

If Mr Vajpayee’s government made a mistake it was not so much in the imposition of President’s rule but in not consulting their allies in advance. And, more importantly, in not understanding the kind of role Congress intended to play. The Congress may succeed in making it impossible to dismiss Rabri Devi’s government by using their strength in the Rajya Sabha to oppose it but in doing so they will have lost not won. It could, in fact, be the first serious political mistake Sonia Gandhi has made since she took over as party President.

Of Budget blues and Lahore

by Amita Malik

THOSE of us who were watching TV last week — and who wasn’t? — just could not get away from two events, the aftermath of the bus to Lahore and Yashwant Sinha’s marathon budget performance.

There were long wrap-ups of the visit to Lahore, as apart from the bus. Star News seems to have sent a battalion of reporters to dig out every possible story and some of them scored heavily on the social and cultural front. These were leisurely and documented reports on pretty much everything from young avant-garde theatre people fighting the state and fundamentalism to lively young pop groups and the tombs of famous writers. There was the celebration of Basant even after the Hindus and Sikhs have left,”because it has to do with the seasons and not religion”. There were also some very articulate and interesting modern women to open our eyes. There was much nostalgia on both sides and some revealing touches of warmth and goodwill from ordinary people.

It seems incredible that two countries physically so close to each other had to rediscover both their differences (mainly political) and common interests because of this trip. In fact it was a very thorough all-round job by Star’s young reporters and that it came after the political fever was over allowed one to absorb more. One also wonders why the few Indian correspondents who are posted from time to time in Pakistan or go there on professional trips, except perhaps for Tavleen Singh, seldom report on the cultural and social scene. One feels sure that more such positive reporting from both sides would do a lot to ease tensions.

For the rest, the budget has been coming out of our eyes and ears for the last few days. Every economic expert in sight, articulate members of trade and industry, bureaucrats, politicians, just name it. They were all rounded up in determined fashion and seemed to appear by turn on every channel. It was strong competition and one is glad that Doordarshan had the good sense to invite Raghav Bahl back where he began, DD’s studios. Bahl has since had vast experience on the BBC and other international channels and did a deft job of handling his fast-changing panels. Raman Nanda did the same in Hindi. The old line-up of Prannoy Roy and T.N. Ninan picked up from where they left off last year. Karan Thapar, Vinod Dua, they all got into the act. And Swaminathan Aiyer even spoke in Hindi on Zee. DD, still being the sarkari channel whatever Promote Mahajan (as he is now known) might say, usually got first pick of the ministers, but Star, in turn, got going solidly throughout with the academics and the bureaucrats and people like N.K. Singh in more expansive mood. The Finance Minister also seemed more relaxed when talking to Ninan and Roy. Every channel had reactions from the regions and state capitals as well as overseas. When it came to places like Singapore, and often in India itself, Doordarshan’s technical quality faltered, as usual. I am not attempting any ranking lists, not least of all because I am not an economic expert. But after a time, after I had worked out how the budget affected me (lipsticks up and gas down) I got pretty bored with all the high-falutin’ stuff and returned thankfully to Saans (which is sadly getting very long in the tooth) cricket from Sri Lanka, a very good film, Music Box on Star Movies, and a spot of Greta Garbo on TNT. Discovery also had some enticing special programmes.

I am beginning to get a thing about some of the distasteful ads which are now appearing on TV and on what are the more sophisticated channels. While not decrying the merits of Fevicol I think their ad, where a man catches four fish by dipping a rod with four dabs of Fevicol on it while the genuine angler looks on in disgust, is a very bad example, especially for children, because it it highly unsporting. I equate it with blowing up streams with dynamite to kill fish Maneka Gandhi could well have a look at it. Then of the utmost vulgarity is the ad about Onida at an airport. Here rude noises are made by a wind instrument on a loudspeaker. This leads a man sitting on an airport bench to suspect the worst from the man sitting next to him apply a handkerchief to his nose and then walk away in disgust. This, I feel, is even worse than the crude toilet jokes of schoolboys and unworthy of exposure on TV. I also find a bit dubious the joke about “Sab Kuch Dekta Hai: of a ball-point pen. However, compensation comes in the form of some highly creative and artistic ads, many of them for drinks. I hope they don’t vanish due to wrongly-placed morality.

75 YEARS AGO

Missing cabinet ministers

CALCUTTA: The following telegram has been received by the Japanese Consul-General at Simla, which was originally received by the Guarding Squadron at Amoy at 7 p.m. on February 24.

In Tokyo some parts of the wards of Akaska, Ushigomo Koishikawa and a larger part of Azabu remain undamaged. In Fukagawa, it is estimated that there are 30,000 casualties.

By the collapsing of the upper storey of the Nand Club Premier Yamamoto was injured.

On the 22nd instant, after the ceremony of forming the Cabinet and at the time of entering the club, he was attacked by some ruffians, but he cleverly escaped and was later washed away by the tidal waves with the Ministers, Messrs. Yamanauchi, Takarabe and Hiranuma, who are all missing.