Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 classic, The Loved One, is about the surreal ridiculousness of American affluence. It is set in a Californian pet cemetery called The Happier Hunting Ground, which sends a death-anniversary card to the owner of every dog or cat buried there. If, say, the deceased were a poodle called Arthur, then Arthur’s master would receive, every year, an expensive-looking card saying, “Your little Arthur is thinking of you in Heaven today and wagging his tail.” There must have been, in the last few days, much wagging and purring in that bit of Heaven to which all the spoilt Indian cats and dogs ascend. Looking down on their earthly kin — though freed, presumably, from carnal appetite — these selfless little souls are surely in especial bliss over the prospect of cheaper food on their bit of the earth. Nutripet and Pedigree are going to be cheaper soon. And from the look of what has been going on in and around parliament since February 28, this seems to have been the most earth-shattering aspect of this year’s budget.

Opposition stalwarts (and a few die-hard communists and socialists), most of whom remain unfazed through all sorts of shocks and scandals throughout the year, have felt the keenest outrage at such decadence in the time of inflation, starvation deaths and farmers’ suicides. The Speaker has had to scold the crowds down with exceptional severity, Ms Sonia Gandhi has “grinned” in the House, ministers have had horrifying visions of cats and dogs feasting on cheaper pet-food wearing uncut gems and jewellery (also made cheaper by the budget), and insinuations have been made about the Congress president’s ten dogs and the finance minister’s Cleo and Coco. An eminent Congressman has got into trouble by remarking frivolously that cheaper pet-food may solve the Left’s food problems. Most crucially, the sangh parivar is revving up to make this a major issue in the Uttar Pradesh elections and Delhi municipal polls. And, apart from the grin and the occasional frivolity, all this has been going on in dead, even raving, earnest. It seems not to have occurred to any of Mr P. Chidambaram’s opponents that there may be less banal aspects of the budget worth criticizing more meaningfully, and that this might just show the Opposition up in a less ridiculous light.

Unlike in the West, pet-food is an absolutely irrelevant commodity to most Indians, rich or poor. Besides, Indian “cats and dogses”— as the indomitable Spiro insists on saying in My Family and Other Animals — turn their noses up at anything that is not properly cooked at home. The price of Pedigree Chums could, by a stretch of the imagination, have made or marred New Labour, but the entire matter is of very little consequence to the Indian economy. Such a fuss over a non-issue like pet-food shows how much more sensible than their human betters cats and dogs can be in their utter indifference to things that simply do not matter.