Most FMs in recent years quoted leading lights. Will Pranabda too?

NEW DELHI: History, goes the old adage, repeats itself. That, read in the context of the presentation of the Union Budget in recent times, has meant conjecture on whom the finance minister would quote. Indeed Manmohan Singh���s pathbreaking 1991 went into more uncharted territory than merely India���s labyrinthine processes, when he paraphrased the French writer, Victor Hugo, to declare ���No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come���.

Though Hugo���s actual quote did not have Singh���s 20th century pithiness (On resiste a l���invasion des armees; on ne resiste pas a l���invasion des idees ��� We can resist the invasion of armies; we cannot resist the invasion of ideas), the idea was well taken. Given the onrush of Urdu couplets and the like since then, it is clear we can resist the invasion of staid speeches but not quotations.

Little wonder that every finance minister after him has taken the cue. P Chidambaram opted for the Tamil seer-poet Thiruvalluvar���s lines, ���Iyattralum, eettalum, kattalum, katta; Vakuthalam vallath arasu (To be able to increase wealth, to lay it up and guard; And also well to distribute it, marks a royal lord), in his first Budget speech and stayed with him for every successive speech.

Yashwant Sinha was noted for quoting Ramdhari Singh Dinkar���s lines, ���The stars of the dark night are fading. The whole sky belongs to you,��� in his first Budget speech, and then his own Prime Minister AB Vajpayee in his second. Jaswant Singh abjured such frills altogether, prompting an industrialist to enquire why he did not quote a single line of poetry. ���Because it���s about economics,��� was his reported reply. Without the Clintonian expletive at the end.
As Pranab Mukherjee stands up to table the Budget on Monday, expectations are mixed.

While he is an avid reader and a workaholic ��� thus unlikely to need a team of researchers to dredge up appropriate flowery aphorisms ��� some old habits may die hard. In 1982, when he took an inordinately long time to read out his maiden Budget speech, Indira Gandhi is said to have joked, ���The shortest finance minister has delivered the longest Budget speech!���

Indeed, given Mukherjee���s formidable erudition, he may well fall back on history, if not to cull out attractive phrases, then to show some parallels. Exactly a century ago, a ���People���s Budget��� was presented in London, which aimed to deal with falling tax revenues while funding deeper social sector reforms. The 1909 proposals included an income tax hike, a super tax on the highest income, a rise in indirect taxes on petrol and tobacco, and a tax on the land (and its sale) held by the wealthy.

The chancellor of the exchequer, Lloyd George, claimed the Budget provisos were his ���war��� to raise money to defeat poverty. He even gave a very long, four-hour speech, after which there was much acrimony and debate before the bill was finally passed.

Not only was it a success, it laid the basis for Britain���s current welfare state. Mr Mukherjee may feel the need to
quote this as he presents his own People���s (aam aadmi) Budget in 2009.