Manmohan (top), Pranab: Division of labour

New Delhi, June 5: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today took the unusual step of issuing a public diktat to finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to ensure the budget fits the policy framework and objectives of his government.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) issued a terse release this afternoon stating: “The Prime Minister has asked the finance ministry to ensure that the next Union budget adequately and appropriately reflects the priorities and programmes outlined in the President’s address to the joint session of Parliament.”

On the face of it, it appears a routine instruction; it is only expected that the budget should reflect the socio-economic direction of the government and the Prime Minister is merely reiterating what’s obvious.

However, the move has tempted speculation on account of the Prime Minister going public with a directive that could easily have been made at the cabinet level.

As one senior Congress leader told The Telegraph: “There is an effort here to mark a new beginning. Manmohan Singh’s second term will be different from the first one, he will seek to stamp his authority as first among equals, something he was not able to do in his first innings.”

A member of the new council of ministers who would not be quoted concurred that the PMO directive meant more than “humdrum paperwork”. He put only a slightly removed interpretation on what he called an unprecedented act.

“It’s true this is a more confident Manmohan Singh, but through such public task-mastering, he intends to very quickly underline the principle of collective responsibility and announce that he will personally monitor co-ordination in critical areas. The impression that often went around in his first term was that his ministers, particularly those belonging to allied parties, were beyond his control and doing their own thing. That such a senior man as Mukherjee is being pegged to defined tasks in public view is probably a message to all of us.”

Another Congress veteran, though, thought the move was inspired by governance rather than political imperatives. “It is very clear from the President’s address that there must be a new synergy between the Congress manifesto, the government’s agenda and the budget. There are development goals that are actually achievable today, and the Prime Minister is only trying to underline his commitment and keenness on that,” he said.

The speedy re-constitution of the Planning Commission by the Prime Minister today was also an exercise aimed at sending out a “we-mean-business” message. The new Planning Commission is a deft balancing act between continuity and change, accelerated economic growth and renewed commitment to aam aadmi concerns, elaborately spelt out in the President’s address.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia retains his job as deputy chairperson, as do economist Abhijit Sen, former cabinet secretary B.K. Chaturvedi and human rights activist Hameeda Sayeed. The new entrants are economists Saumitra Chaudhary and Mihir Shah, and Dalit academician Narendra Jadhav, who is currently honorary vice-chancellor of Pune University.

In retaining Abhijit Sen, an agricultural economist, the Manmohan dispensation is clearly allaying the sense that left-of-centre members had obtained their berths courtesy pressure from Left Front parties. At least two new inductees — Mihir Shah and Narendra Jadhav — have an established record of work in rural areas and particularly among tribals and Dalits.

There is a personal aspect to the Singh-Mukherjee relationship; there is an up-and-down history between the two men that many believe often comes into play. Mukherjee, after all, was finance minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet when Singh was appointed governor of the Reserve Bank of India; today, Singh is the boss and Mukherjee his finance minister.

Sections of the Congress, forever willing to discover and discuss conspiracies, see in today’s directive an element of the personal. Said one Congress leader: “Pranab Mukherjee is a veteran hand, he was finance minister more than a quarter of a century ago, but Manmohan Singh is a new, empowered Manmohan Singh, he might want to send out the message that this is going to be his budget more than it is Pranab Mukherjee’s.”

More seasoned government and party hands, though, caution against overplaying the significance of Singh’s public command to finance minister Mukherjee.

“They have too many years between them to be wanting to put each other down publicly, the Prime Minister is underlining his primacy and foregrounding his priorities but that does not automatically mean he wants to slight Pranab Mukherjee,” said a senior Congress MP who has worked with both.

“There may have been adjustments to be made on both sides initially, but for a long time there has been no confusion about the pecking order and this mandate has ironed off any misconceptions about who is this boss of the government.”