Behind the speech

There is one thing that all Budget  speeches have in common. The finance minister delivering the speech may be interim or permanent; the poet quoted may be Tamil, Bengali, or North Indian; the emphasis may be on farmers, or on the middle class, or on government employees — but all Budget speeches conceal more than they reveal. It is not the purpose of a Budget speech to reveal and explain the details of the Union Budget, but in fact to conceal them. This is not because of a search for cheap applause lines — multiple such applause lines might exist