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The Budget is no longer FM's prerogative; it will come from the US

An official status report was being presented in the House on the progress of the on-going discussions between this country's Minister of External Affairs Jaswant Singh and US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott over such ''issues as India's non-signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the sanctions imposed by the Western powers in the wake of Pokhran.

A member of Parliament was obviously lacking in manners. He rose to enquire of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee whether it was right that while we were represented in the discussions by our minister of external affairs, no less, the US administration had condescended to send only a junior-level functionary -- a deputy secretary. This was no way, he felt, of treating a sovereign nation. Should not we protest?

The prime minister promptly rose in his seat. In this very sensitive matter we should not insist on protocol. After all, when the talks with the US started, our external affairs minister had no official status and was only deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. The US authorities did not, however, the prime minister said, stand on ceremony and readily agreed to enter into formal negotiations with us; we should have the generosity to reciprocate the gesture, and desist from raising a furore over the fact that our minister of external affairs had to sit down for talks with a mere deputy secretary from the dumps of Foggy Bottom.

The prime minister was wrong in a matter of important detail. The deputy chairman of our Planning Commission, he forgot -- or chose to forget-- has the official status of a Cabinet minister; he has the right to attend all Cabinet meetings. So, even in the early stages of the Indo-US talks, the country's representations were asymmetrical: the US administration had rubbed it in that we were little more than a vassal State which had deviated from discipline, a deputy secretary dispatched from Washington, DC should be enough to straighten us out.

It is this deputy secretary who has now announced to the world that the phase of insubordination was over, India was soon going to sign the CTBT, but the sanctions will for the present continue. Our Parliament is yet to be consulted over this major switch of policy on the part of our government.

But leave that out. There was not even a joint communique on behalf of the two governments. A vassal State should know its place. The government installed in New Delhi does. It took a bare half-year for the bravado of May to be buried in the hailstorms of January.

We need not ourselves inform the neighbourhood that we have ceased to be a sovereign and independent nation and been reduced to the status of a banana republic; a serf gets known as a serf because it conducts itself as one. Decisions reached by the US administration are henceforth to be regarded as our decisions; that is the essence of servitude, notwithstanding the mild apologia voiced by the former socialist who takes pride as the defence minister.

In this situation, it is pointless to raise epistemological queries concerning sense and sensibility. The government in New Delhi does not know how long it is going to survive. Internal dissensions are tearing apart the major party in the ruling coalition; the economy is in deep recession, and a serious Balance of Payment problem is threatening to re-emerge. Signs of anarchy and disorderliness are rampant all over the country; India's name is mired in international concourses following the grisly happenings in Gujarat and Orissa; the Shiv Sena's antics over the visit of the Pakistan cricket team have contributed another black mark to the reputation of the nation.

Hope nonetheless springs eternal in the human breast, hope that a saviour, you know who, is round the corner. The message must have been transmitted along the shivering corridors of North and South Blocks: since our very existence is in peril, do not ask any questions, just surrender to the superpower. Just five decades and a couple of odd years, the mai-baap ethos is back with vengeance.

What else too can be inferred from the extraordinary manner in which the finance minister is going about on Budget-eve?

His perambulations are strongly resembling the calisthenics bulged in by a jumping jack. He claims he does not mind spilling the beans: it is going to be a stern, hard Budget. By which he means that the financial side in the budgetary presentation will be of little cheer. But do we not already know that? We also know a bit more? Formulating the contours of the Government of India's Budget is no longer the prerogative of the country's finance minister and his associates and advisers; it is not subject to the wishes and predilections of the Union Cabinet either.

Let there be no mincing of words, the Budget is a pre-packaged material despatched from Washington, DC. This country owes to the various entities headquartered in the US capital roughly one hundred billion dollars. He who pays the piper calls the tune. None can therefore question the right of Foggy Bottom to announce India's defence policy in the future. The terrain ought to seem to be familiar; for in the not very distant past, the secretary of state for India was wont to declare war on sundry foreign powers on behalf of the subject-country, India.

In any event a national defence, foreign and economic policies are intertwined. It is a well-publicised fact -- dared nor contradicted by South Block -- that the US authorities insisted, as a pre-condition to the lifting of the post-Pokhran sanctions, a pledge from the Vajpayee regime to ram through Parliament the insurance and patents legislations. That the principal Opposition, the Congress, was also a party to the arrangement does not detract from the substance of the story.

The finance minister's pre-Budget barking is hence not to be taken as any major departure; he is barking because quarters in Washington, DC want him to bark, and bark according to a particular cadence. The American mindset -- with additional inspiration bequeathed by Margaret Thatcher's writings -- has come to shape the views of India's finance minister. His focus is narrow, inordinately so. As if the nation's existence depends on trimming the size of the fiscal deficit alone, the rest of the considerations -- including those related to the problems of poverty, malnutrition, educational backwardness and unemployment -- could be relegated to the back-burner.

It is a non-nonsense message that Washington, DC has transmitted to India's Budget-framers: the deficit must be scaled down, but raising direct imposts is out, hiking import duties is equally anathema, therefore concentrate on steep increases in the levels of administered prices.

This, it goes without saying, has to be accompanied by, as the quaint expression goes, 'downsizing' government outlays, including on subsidies and the public distribution system. Some window-dressing is of course called for -- allocations for a few social sectors because of the exigencies of domestic politics -- otherwise the command is to cut back public expenditure here, there, everywhere.

It is necessary to be candid though. Why venture to put only this finance minister in the dock? The shift in India's fiscal circumstances really got going in June 1991. As to foreign policy, especially foreign economic policy, the concordat between India's ruling classes, irrespective of the different political parties they usually belong to, remains strong and firm despite the visible outward signs of dissonance: the economy has to be opened up, our dependence on external resources in order to accelerate the pace of economic growth must be total, all that is required to bring about that denouncement should be pursued single-mindedly.

This, then, is the curiosum. The principal political formation will sweat their faith in the concept of national unity, they will still not be averse to set in motion centrifugal forces that spell disintegration of the polity. They cannot tolerate one other and ceaselessly plot the downfall of the adversaries on the domestic front.

And yet, a common thread of understanding binds these sworn enemies on one particular issue: come what may, foreign investors must be accorded the red carpet treatment in all seasons. The age of imperialism, knew ye all, belongs to the dump heap of history, and exploitation as a philosophical concept has lost its relevance.

Perhaps it is such full-scale globalisation of finance capital that this country's finance minister is working for; his pre-Budget perorations are a curtain-raiser.

Ashok Mitra