Budget 2018 was Arun Jaitley's middle class imagination unable to cater to the vulnerable
The recent BJP Budget has been regarded as a mix of accounting and political economy specifying the policies of the state. It conveys to many, an expert’s sense of the magic of numbers. At one level, we have the experts’ drama of numbers, an analyst’s performance, but at another level, it is a subjective exercise, a case of wishful thinking, an expert’s subconscious exacted as a dream. A Budget is a symbolic, psychoanalytic act, where numbers become symptoms of what a regime wants, thinks and hopes for.
In fact, as one looks at Arun Jaitley and his role as finance minister, there is a sense of him as the quintessential middle class man, embodying upper middle class values. The Budget is essentially a Jaitley performance, an evocation of middle class dreams and values. The words often used to describe his texts are "fiscal prudence" and monetary restraint. Yet, this year, there was a sense of mixed signals, a sense of doubt and confusion, beyond the sense of order that one must analyse.
Agri conundrum
Overtly, one senses an electoral anxiety: a BJP fighting a war of nerves within itself. This is a party that wants to desperately stay in power with a convincing majority and Jaitley’s roulette of numbers reflects that search for stability. Modi, Shah and Jaitley realise that BJP as a middle class party needs to be more than middle class to remain in power.
The Budget is a middle class exercise to show how a regime takes care of the others and it reveals interesting symptoms. Even where it tries to distance itself from the middle class and speak the language of empowerment or invoke the mnemonics of socialism, it does it in a middle class way. The market and technology are still its palliatives for every problem. Predictably, even in denying its middle class-ness as a mentality, the BJP remains banally middle class.
The first and obvious crises tackled is agriculture. The challenge is to the unsustainability of agriculture and its sense of farming as a way of life. The finance minister’s response is palliative and symptomatic. He cannot think beyond sop and subsidy. He thinks by fixing price and providing incentives to a few projects he has solved the problem. One wishes the finance minister had a sociologist, a poet, a peasant leader whetting his policy. He produces a clerk’s response and seems quite content with it. The short term seems to suit his imagination better because agriculture in the long term eludes the BJP.
His experts emphasise as two USP of the Budget the ease of living and the ease of doing business. One wishes he had added an ease of pursuing agriculture where agriculture is understood as more than a set of inputs into energy, or a patronising act of subsidy. Here again, the BJP is pinned in its lack of details. It threatens to follow the Swaminathan report about guaranteeing a 50 per cent cost of production as subsidy for agriculture. But it is not clear whether such an organic statement extends to anything beyond the current Kharif crop.
The Budget becomes not a collection of solutions but symptoms of the confusions of the regime. The key words Jaitley enjoys is value addition. He wants to move from the worlds of agriculture to the annexe of food processing. He wants to focus on tomato and onion and it’s amazing how many experts believe that tomato purees could extend the life of agriculture.
Superficial elation
Jaitley sounds like a middle class expert in a standard grid of dualisms that make him pretend to be normal when he faces the schizophrenia of Bharat versus India, rural-urban divide, Davos versus Made in India, middle class versus the margins. The Budget papers over the structural problem of these dualisms and their demands. Only one word describes this psychological situation. During World War II, US soldiers told to dig ditches and fill them invented the word SNAFU (situation normal, all fouled up) for the act. This Budget is a SNAFU budget in terms of agriculture.
One senses the same superficial excitement around education especially after the BJP and its ideologues have corroded the autonomy of the university. What one sees in every case is a chorus of experts from Kumar to Adhia to Nilkeni sing Hosannah to the regime. Reading Nilkeni one is reminded of the old slogan, “What is good for Ford is good for USA.” Nilkeni does a similar bit by exclaiming what is good for the digital economy is good for education. An overemphasis on technology can distract from wider notions of knowledge and learning.
Privatising health
What is bias for technology in education, becomes a bias for large scale privatisation in medicine. Probably the most hyped-up part of the Budget is Jaitley’s agenda for "Modicare", a plan along the lines of Obamacare. There is a sense of gigantism here, a vision of scale based on reform envy, a search for the world's largest medical programme. But statistics in one thing, content and method are another.
What looks like an attempt to create a giant public health project is merely a cover to privatise medicine hand it over to insurance and pharma companies. One also sense an indifference to earlier programmes such as National Rural Health mission which fades into anonymity. Gigantism, whether in medicine or memory (think of the Patil statue) has been a part of Modi’s strategy. What however gets created is a spectacle, not a structure of institutions that transforms the everyday life of a people.
Without regulation of such insurance, health costs can be inflationary. Whether it is the farmer sutra the medical sutra or the educational sutra, one senses a failure of the middle class imagination. Finally, the Budget does little for the middle class itself. Any gain in salaries has been offset by cess levied to meet education costs. Deep down, the Budget is not anti-middle class. It reflects more a ruling middle class imagination unable to cater to the margins or the vulnerable.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)