BJP/NDA’s RK Puram Budget

– Rajiv Desai is president of Comma Consulting and a well-known Delhi-based columnist R.K. Puram is a determinedly downmarket neighbourhood in southwest Delhi. It is chock-a-block with government colonies for middle-level bureaucrats, schooled in a cruel education system that strips young people of hope and ideals, and transformed into cynics who have held the economy to ransom. These housing settlements are pleasant enough with shady trees and large green spaces. The apartment buildings, however, are a different story. Built by the Central Public Works Department, they are shoddy and ugly; islands of inferior design in an otherwise pleasing environment. Decent homes in the neighbourhood would sell for upward of several crores… but the colonies of R.K. Puram are free of price and value, odious abodes for dyspeptic babus who worship at the altar of mediocrity. RK Puram sprang to mind as I reviewed the Union Budget 2015-16 presented on February 28 to Parliament and the nation by the absolute-majority BJP-led NDA government. In his budget speech, finance minister Arun Jaitley presented us with an economic RK Puram, dressed up with rhetoric and intention but tacky, grotesque and dysfunctional in content. Its bottom line: higher taxes, greater government spending and significant tax policy obfuscation to keep everyone guessing. Not particularly known for his grasp of economics and innocent of a sense of irony, the finance minister said in his budget speech: “It is quite obvious that incremental change is not going to take us anywhere. We have to think in terms of a quantum jump.” This resolute intention apart, the rest of his speech was devoted to what might best be described as bureaucratic tinkering such as raising taxable income deductions, easing resolution of commercial disputes and what have you. All the words, sentences and paragraphs of the speech failed to obscure the reality that it’s a bureaucrat’s budget. Claiming credit for the introduction of a constitutional amendment to facilitate a nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST), the finance minister appeared to sweep under the rug his party’s opposition to GST when the Congress-led UPA first proposed it. Likewise in the debate over the land acquisition Bill, disingenuously protesting against the opposition’s “politics of obstruction”, Jaitley seems to have conveniently forgotten that his party had supported the UPA-sponsored land Bill while opposing everything else including permission to multinational insurance firms to increase equity in joint ventures. During the UPA’s two terms, the disruptions forced by the BJP were frequent, extended and virtually paralysed Parliament. Now the party espouses both proposals. The finance minister’s innocence of irony was matched by his lack of grace. This was abundantly evident in his ad hominem attack on the previous government, castigating its ten-year tenure as a “scam, scandal and corruption raj”. These are not only the finance minister’s failings; almost no one in his party has the sensibility or moderation required of statesmanship. To return to the budget proposals, several of them stand out for their potential to hurt the economy. First, the increase in…