My Budget Speech

WHAT is a budget ? Well, if you go by the dictionary, it is an "annual estimate of revenue and expenditure." Now, Makhdum Shahabuddin , the Minister of State  for Finance, made a brilliant speech, giving us the federal budget by 1994-95.

          I heard it all on Thursday night, June 9. The Makhdum went on and on for all of three hours. Yet, at the end of his marathon performance, I could make neither head nor tail of it. The young and nearly handsome Minister spoke and spoke, with frequent sips from a glass of water by his side. The bureaucrat who wrote the speech for him is apparently a Roshan Ara Begum.

          The Begum, it is said, once told a questioner: "I never tell lies. But I am careless with the truth from time to time." So, the Makhdum's speechwriter never told a lie. But he was not careless with the truth, from time to time, but all the time. It was brilliant stuff, brilliantly delivered. Who says that the Central Board of Revenue should be abolished? The CBR  has some mighty good chaff on board and they always come to the aid of the party, provided the party is in power.

          The poor Makhdum, the great gentleman that he is, knows as little about finance as does my class IX nephew. Had I written the budget  speech myself, I would have taken buy twenty minutes of the National Assembly 's precious time. Even less.

          Would you like to read my budget  speech? Please, because I'll never be finance minister here or in the Hereafter. By your permission then, here goes:

Mr. Speaker Sir,

                                It has fallen to my lot to present the federal budget  for 1994-95. I don't know what I did to deserve this but here I am. The Economic Survey for the preceding year is already before you. As usual, it is a brilliant document, which does not tell you anything, which you don't already know. And it most certainly does not tell you anything, which you must know.

          The Prime Minister  let half the budget  out of bag when she gave you the outlines of the Karachi  package. The rest of it she leaked in her pre-budget speech from the throne. She took the meat out of my budget speech. I can now only share with you the bony leftovers. Who says we do not have an open government . In fact, we are so open someone ought to stand up and tell us that our ship is showing. Since this has not been done even by the Opposition, it should be taken to mean that the nation has full faith in our style of governance.

          Now, Mr. Speaker. Sir, if no one asks us what the style of our governance is, I owe it to the people who voted us into power to tell them how we operate. The answer, Mr. Speaker, Sir, is that we don't operate because we are not a government  of operators. That was the style of the previous regime. It operated, and it operated outrageously. It did its best to make things difficult for us, but by the Grace of Allah , we have overcome all problems created by the thrice-accursed previous regime. We have achieved this by simply deciding to follow in its footsteps.

          The only thing wrong with the previous regime, Mr. Speaker, Sir, was that it was not our regime. Therefore, Sir, it was not a moral regime. It did not have a popular mandate for plunder-mentation. Only we have the mandate for this patriotic pastime and we intend to make full use of the mandate the people of Pakistan  have given us to do as we please for the next five . . . er . . . fifty years.

          As we look back in history, Mr. Speaker, Sir, we'll find that it has always been the previous regime, which has been responsible for all of our socio-economic travails. We are determined, therefore, Sir, to do everything in our power to remain the present regime because the present regime in incapable of doing anything wrong.

          The crimes of the previous regime, Mr. Speaker, Sir, are far too numerous for me to recount here. I will give only a few instances of the dastardly crimes committed by it.

          To begin with, it was not led by a Khandani prime minister. His forbears were neither knight commanders of the British  Empire , nor Khan Bahadurs, nor members of the ICS, not yet of the latter's successor club, the CSP. I mean we can have the Ghulam Muhammads, the Muhammad Alis, the Iskander Mirzas, the Ishaq Khans, but not an ordinary son of the soil. What he did to the country is there for all of us to see.

          Again, Mr. Speaker, Sir, but for the hair brained yellow cab scheme launched by the previous regime, we could have had $92 billion in our foreign exchange reserves.

          Yet again, I want to draw the attention of this August House, Mr. Speaker, Sir, to the fact that had the previous regime not embarked upon its mad motorway scheme, there would have been no drought in Islamabad  and elsewhere in the country.

          The previous regime was so bad, in fact, Mr. Speaker, Sir, that we have been obliged to continue with its basic policies such as privatisation, deregulation, etc, and now I come to my taxation proposals for which the honourable members will have to listen to me for all of three hours. . . ."

(Disorder, catcalls, thumping of desks, every member speaking at the same time.)

          Nothing daunted, I continue with my speech. I begin to add emphasis where it is not needed and hurry through portions, which require a slower tempo. At the end of it all, the House knows as much about the national finances as it did before I started. And it took me only 17 minutes and 48 seconds (interruptions included). Even the Opposition legislators were impressed. As one MNA from the Nawaz Sharif  camp told me in the cafeteria later: "We have to hand it to you. At least you did not tax our patience."

* * * * *

AND now a quote on life in overcrowded cities. John D. MacDonald  has taken it from Nightmare in Pink . These lines were written in 1996:

It was just past noon and the offices were beginning to flood the streets with a warm hurrying flow of girls. A burly man, in more than a hurry than I was, bumped into me and thrust me into a tall girl. They both whirled and snarled at me.

New York  is where it is going to begin. I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm and try to eat the world. We are nearing the critical point. One-day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York . But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each other's throats in a dreadful silence. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their seats and stamped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world and by dawn of the next day, there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles and gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through the silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down.

Do you see anything of Karachi  and Lahore  in these lines?

Friday, June 17, 1994