Yesterday, KN Balagopal, Kerala’s Finance Minister, presented his sixth budget in the Assembly. This also happens to be the final budget of the current LDF ministry, with the Assembly nearing the end of its term and elections expected around May this year. Nevertheless, the budget speech was remarkably lengthy, taking the minister nearly three hours to complete.

The budget, coming from a government in the final phase of its term, would be expectedly replete with sops and aimed at courting voter support, with considerations of practicality and fiscal realism taking a back seat. When a ministry has a fairly clear sense of how elections are likely to pan out, budgetary announcements tend to drift far from practical realities. The Kerala budget is no different: in its attempts to garner votes and to project the ‘progressiveness’ of the political ideology backing the government, the LDF often announces bizarre or unconventional schemes and proposals. In 2011, just before another LDF government neared the end of its term, TM Thomas Isaac, the then Kerala Minister for Finance, earmarked a whopping Rs 40,000 crore for road development – an amount for which he had no clear idea of where the funds would come from, and a scale of road development that never materialised in the years that followed. At the time, the LDF was attempting to woo the Muslim vote bank, and Thomas Isaac appeared on the platforms of several Muslim organisations, defending the idea of “Islamic banking" and arguing that Islamic banking could “contribute in a big way" to help Kerala mobilise funds for development. The Rs 40,000 crore allocation for road development, too, was linked to the idea of Islamic banking. The government changed soon after and, fortunately, little was heard about Islamic banking during the subsequent governments.

Minority........

© News18