| Once again we have gone through our annual ritual during which, in the manner of orthodox Hindus, we have paraded the sacred figures of the Budget, and then solemnly immersed them and watched them sink without trace in a sea of rhetoric. There is something gratifying about propitiating one’s governing deities in this time-honoured way. It has a cathartic effect on ordinary believers for it helps them to feel during a moment of public communion that they are part of a larger worshipping community, and it provides the supervising Brahmins in Islamabad an opportunity of reasserting their role as self-appointed intermediaries between the people and their destiny. |
| Budgets, like those fabricated images, have no greater force than the invisible forces they represent. Belief is the essential ingredient for the whole masquerade to be successful. And if that vital ingredient is missing, the entire show becomes a hollow sham. Take the actual Budget address itself. Tradition requires that the Budget is addressed to the Speaker of the House. Is he really the only citizen most interested in its proposal? Is he the only one affected by them? Surely the audience that was most concerned was not just the elevated Speaker or even the table-thumbing House but the general public, that mass of consumers whose shrinking purses were being picked clean yet again. Isn’t it time that we should change the form at least and have the Budget announced to the public at large directly, instead of being revealed like some tawdry strip-tease inch by unexciting inch before jaded voyeurs? |
Published in THE NATION 28 May 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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