Five days before the country’s 64th Union Budget seems a good time for a bird’s eye-view of the succession of this exciting annual event on the last day of February that I have covered or been a witness to. (Until the turn of the millennium, the Budget used to be presented at 5 pm; mercifully, the timing now is 11 am, thanks to Yashwant Sinha, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s finance minister.)

To tell finance minister Pranab Mukherjee what to do or undo is best left to pundits of finance and fiscal, dismal science wonks and trumpeters of tycoons.
The first Budget I covered as a very young and raw reporter was John Mathai’s third and last in 1950. Almost immediately after getting his Budget passed, he resigned in protest against Jawaharlal Nehru’s decision to set up the Planning Commission with powers that the finance minister considered “excessive”. Mathai’s farewell performance was remarkable for his highly combative replies to his critics at the end of the Budget debate. For instance, he called a trade union leader from Gujarat “a Bania masquerading as a labour leader”. Another member, he said, “mistook Parliament for the UN”. More hard-hitting was his advice to Durga Bai, a prominent member who had waxed eloquent about the man-in-the-street: “Please do not take so seriously every man you meet in the street”. (As it happened, some years later, Durga Bai, then a member of the Planning Commission, married Mathai’s successor as finance minister, C.D. Deshmukh.)
Deshmukh, a member of the heaven-born Indian Civil Service (ICS) of the British days and a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, was the first bureaucrat to become a Union Cabinet minister. However, before discussing his nearly six-year stint, it is only fair to mention that the man who had the honour to present the first Budget after the tryst with destiny was R.K. Shanmukham Chetty, a respected businessman of what was then Madras. His Budget was a declaration of war on those who had evaded taxes during World War II. Ironically, he also ensured his departure by excluding from the list of suspected tax-dodgers to be investigated the owners of a favoured business house.
It was Deshmukh who set the trend of quoting ancient Sanskrit shlokas or even verses in Tamil, not his mother tongue, in his Budget speeches. Others followed his practice enthusiastically. Consequently, rare is a Budget speech that is not studded with apt Urdu or Hindi poetry or verses in various other languages or even a catchy title of a Bollywood film. P. Chidambaram, now Union home minister, excelled in this art when he was finance minister first in the United Front government (1996-1998) and then in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government until 2008. Mr Mukherjee then returned to the portfolio he likes the most. It needs to be added that he was the first member of the Rajya Sabha to be made finance minister during Indira Gandhi’s second innings in the 1980s.
Interestingly, Deshmukh resigned from the Nehru Cabinet in 1956 not because of any differences on economic policy but because he was enraged over a proposal to either make Bombay a city state and be kept out of Maharashtra or the bilingual Bombay state continuing. His successor was T.T. Krishnamachari who had coveted the finance portfolio for long. But the country was in the throes of a foreign exchange crunch which required heavy cuts in expenditure that were inevitably unpopular. His popularity declined further when, on the advice of the renowned Hungarian economist, Nicholas Kaldor, he imposed both wealth tax and expenditure tax but forgot to reduce the rates of income tax in what came to be known as the “Krishnamachari-Kaldor Budget”.
TTK, as everyone called him, had to resign in February 1958 because of the “Mundhra affair”, a case of Life Insurance Corporation’s questionable investments in the highly dubious firms of industrialist Haridas Mundhra. Since the interval before the Budget was too short, Nehru temporarily took over the finance portfolio and presented the next Budget amidst much applause, especially when he quoted from William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. However, when some difficult questions were put to him during the Budget debate, he charmingly replied: “I know little of high finance and am a bird of passage in this ministry. Wait for the new incumbent”.
The new incumbent was Morarji Desai who earned several distinctions. He presented the largest number of Budgets, eight in all and two of them on his birthday, February 29! He was the only finance minister to be divested of his portfolio without being asked to leave the Cabinet (in 1969 by Indira Gandhi). He came to grief also over the gold control he had imposed in his 1963 Budget after the border war with China and before he was eased out of the Nehru Cabinet under the famous Kamraj Plan. Above all, Desai was the first of the two finance ministers to become Prime Minister later, the second being Manmohan Singh, of course. R. Vekataraman, a rather popular finance minister, was the only one to become the republic’s President.
Indira Gandhi, like her father before and her son Rajiv Gandhi later, briefly took over the finance ministry after Desai’s exit. She nationalised major banks and saw to it that a populist Budget was presented and approved.
Constraint of space compels me to jump straight to Dr Manmohan Singh’s first Budget in 1991. It was a major landmark because it propelled India’s controlled economy towards liberalisation and globalisation. In 1996, the year in which the Narashima Rao government was voted out, there were signs that Dr Singh wasn’t receiving from his party the support he needed. No wonder, in the course of his Budget speech he wistfully remarked: “I feel like going to theatre tonight”. The allusion to Abraham Lincoln was missed by many, but not the Urdu verse he quoted: “Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai, Dekhna hai zor kitna baazu-e-qaatil mein hai”.
In the prevailing political ambience and national mood, the good doctor might be tempted to recite this couplet yet again.