opinion
Incest At The Vaudeville
Govt/media/industry. It's a closed, cosy club of technocrats.
Shiv Visvanathan
One wanted to write a humorous piece. But watching the budget as
theatre and performance, I realised the joke was on me. My
disappointment with the budget stems not from the fact that it is a
dismal science but that it is dismal theatre.
The presentation of the budget as a public self has changed. Three
things in particular create a sense of concern. There is an absence of
the political. The comments from trade unions, ideologists are
missing. There is also the separation of the political and the
economic. The budget is a technical affair and political economy, once
a great general perspective, is treated as an embarrassment. Finally,
there's the disappearance of the housewife. The housewife was the
great tuning fork and legitimator of the budget as a democratic
exercise. Oddly, she is lost in the individuality of consumption.
Previously, the housewife was still the economist, an expert on the
domestic economy. Yet the household disappears in the new public
sphere, which sanitises ideology and valorises expertise. The person
on the street is no longer 'aam aadmi'. Aam aadmi has been
strategically appropriated into an empty ideal type. R.K. Laxman's
common man and his wife look absentmindedly distant, wryly realising
that the aam aadmi has dispensed with their everyday world. The aam
aadmi is an empty set, the latest entrant into the abstract world of
the Congress party.
The sense of buzz and anticipation the budget had was real. Gossip,
rumour, speculation and hope were a part of general conversation. The
budget had a sense of drama, rhetoric, debate, a wonderful fizz of
protest. There was a sense of democracy, which extended to the debate.
One sensed till then that analysing the budget was a part of citizenly
competence. Today, the budget as anticipatory theatre is muted, a
distant act from a distant universe of lobbyists.
The text is increasingly middle class. It is also restricted to a
small cabal of experts, who all seem part of the same club, and seem
reluctant to break the consensus. Government, media, or corporations
seem cuddled up close to one another. It is not just that the
incestuousness is facile. The preludes to the budget are even more
farcical. One newspaper had a budget picnic, with three experts
sitting in a car like vaudeville performers. There is an argument for
the return of silent movies in economics. Slapstick without the text
would be more bearable. The obscenity lies in the antiseptic
bloodlessness of what is a ritual bloodletting. Camus' statement,
"Statistics don't bleed", is only partly true. They hide a
haemorrhaging under the guise of abstract numbers.
One must recognise the strange spillover of the media playing shadow
cabinet. The pomposity of the media is not even funny. They turn the
evaluation of the budget into an incestuous act, going hysterical
about the walkout. Discussions of the walkout seem the only reference
to politics in the budget. The word political economy has become
invisible in a club of technocrats offering 7.5 to 8.5 to the budget
as if it has been auctioned to the highest bidder among lobbyists. The
walkout may just represent the Opposition's attempt to let in some
fresh air into current economics. The language is so formulaic that
one wonders where simple ideas like petrol hike, price rise have
disappeared. The word aam aadmi is used as an afterthought, an empty
formula, a substitute for the sense of the people, livelihoods that
have disappeared.
One has to ask whether the budget as a sanitised table hides certain
realities. Does livelihood mean the same as work? Does the informal
economy have an official status? Or does the disappearance of certain
groups in the stakeholder discussion game indicate that the budget has
been hypothecated to a few lobbies? Once in Calcutta, I saw a tiny
cobbler stall with a hoarding, 'Hypothecated to Bank of India'. Is our
budget and budget debates hypothecated to a few lobbies?
One wonders whether the budget is today part of democratic theatre. As
one wag said, Shahrukh Khan and Karan Johar might have done a more
humane and ironic job of emphasising the budget's logic. The
performative aspects of budgets are an early warning system about
professional attitudes to everyday problems. If this budget is a sign,
then the people of India should wake with their housewife budgets,
budgets of informal economy, their own vision of their own world.
Their silence will no longer do as budgets tell you little about the
logic of ordinary lives and livelihoods.
(Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist.)
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