A Quiet Coup in the Fisc

Sanjaya Baru The finance minister would like us to believe that his budget was shaped by his philosophy of 'non-doctrinaire socialist pragmatism'. However, what one discovers is only a veneer of socialism covering a hard core of pragmatism. While pragmatism is no dirty word in today's world, the finance minister was obviously unwilling to consider a little bit of that other non-dirty word, namely, perestroika, in his budget There is little evidence of any desire to bring about significant restructuring in the fiscal strategy of the union government, a strategy that the National Front has itself been critical about. What we have on offer is a budget of continuity rather than change.