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Budget 2018: Of too many 'poors', pakodas and yellow lawmakers

If a Budget has a colour, this one was yellow

Budget 2018 LIVE: Arun Jaitley Budget speech begins; track top developments
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Budget 2018 LIVE: Arun Jaitley Budget speech; track top developments

Aditi Phadnis New Delhi
It was just the beginning of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s Budget (2018-19) speech and he had already used the word “poor” half a dozen times. Slightly irritated, the former president of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi, twisted in her front row seat to alert her son and current Congress president Rahul Gandhi (sitting in the row behind) to this fact.

It was not hard to lip-read. “Why aren’t you saying something?” she asked. Kamal Nath (who was sitting next to Rahul Gandhi) gesticulated to explain, possibly, that they would do it at the end of the speech. Nothing happened. After