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| 'What the world has experienced is an economic tsunami' | | Jaswant Singh's speech in Lok Sabha |
| Jaswant Singh / New Delhi Aug 02, 2009, 00:38 IST |
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 It is while facing the hon’ble finance minister that I am fed by some sense of nostalgia. I was mentioning it to the leader and the deputy leader of my party that this is my eighth term in Parliament. I am beset by a sense of nostalgia because some 30 years back, it was the first time that I exchanged views on the Finance Bill and budgetary proposals with Shri Pranab Mukherjee, who, I would presume would allow me the intimacy of referring him as Pranab Babu because though we confronted each other on the Finance Bill 30 years ago, it was with appease and not with lathis and dandas.
In a similar way, I do submit and I say it sincerely that Pranab Babu, we wish fervently that you succeeded as the finance minister of the country. This is the job you have wanted for long; you are suited for it and in your success the country benefits. If the finances and the economy of the country are sound, then it is the common man whose benefit you are advocating. The aam admi will benefit. How can we wish the country’s finances to suffer? We, in this side of the House, certainly cannot wish it.
I have to share a larger thought with you to which I will come subsequently. It is about the totality of the systems that we have inherited from the British and continued with in the Ministry of Finance. There is a connected problem.
That connected problem, if you permit me to say, Mr Finance Minister, came in the latest Economist and I would read a part of it. “Of all the economic bubbles that have been pricked, a few have burst most spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself.”
This is not a light comment. This is a very serious comment and we have to reflect on it. When we reflect on the totality of the Budget, of which the Finance Bill is a part, what the world has experienced, hon’ble finance minister, is actually an economic tsunami. We cannot be totally absolved from the consequences of it.
In a recent lecture, Shri Paul Krugman, who is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008, has argued that much of the past 30 years of macro economics was spectacularly useless at best and positively harmful at worst.
These are thoughts that we must seriously reflect upon because economists must understand finance. Finance professors need to think harder in the context in which they are working. After all, in the end, economists are social scientists trying to understand how society and the world are working.
The Finance Bill has its origin. I really wanted to mention it the other day in a different context. From the President’s address to the joint session of Parliament, a lot of things flow. The entire policy of the government flows and the Budget also flows in its totality from that. The Finance Bill is the child of the Budget. The Budget, in a sense, is the instrument of the fiscal policy of the government. But the essence of the fiscal policy of any government has to be two-fold. One is, it is not simply the service of pure economics that is at the heart of the management of the country’s economy but it is the citizen. We are not subserving a pure empty theory, we have to subserve the benefit of the citizen.
There is, Mr Finance Minister, if I might submit to you, an equally important objective that the Finance Bill must have and that objective is the objective of imparting to the country’s public life a degree of purity.
I will come to the point of how the Budget and the Finance Bill can be instruments that will impart to the country’s public life a sense of morality and purity. But I wish to, from the general aspects of the Finance Bill, come to parochial, not personally parochial but nationally parochial points.
Excerpts from the speech made by BJP MP Jaswant Singh in the Lok Sabha
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