It has taken less than a week for the euphoria over the budget to peter out. Even to begin with, it was by no means roses, roses all the way for the finance minister, Yashwant Sinha. For every bouquet presented to him by captains of industry, he had to suffer the indignity of a brickbat thrown at him by trade unions alarmed at the prospect of thousands of workers losing their jobs if and when the proposed change in the labour laws comes into force. The mixed reaction is no surprise. The corporate sector was thrilled because of the tax cuts, the lowering of the interest rates and the carrot of a labour policy which will enable units of upto a 1000 workers to lay off surplus staff. But the cash in stock prices dampened its spirit, reminding it that it was by no means immune to the spread effect of any slackening of the economy at the nerve-centre of the global market. The trade unions will, in any case, make life difficult for the government, knowing its record of going back, under duress, on decisions hard to implement. In any case, not many alliance partners want to risk acquiring an anti-working-class image. Even otherwise, some features of the budget mock the agenda of the ruling coalition. How do cuts in the already meagre earnings of many indigent families, that reduce the interest paid on small savings, tally with the vaunted concern of the alliance partners for those who can hardly eke out just enough to keep body and soul together? Indeed, while chipping away at the subsistence incomes of the poor, the budget provides for freer imports of foreign liquors to cater to the luxury needs of the newly rich spawned by the so-called structural adjustments. Of course, all this does not prevent members of the ruling coalition from calling themselves neo-Gandhians at a time when most ideological labels have lost their meaning and the very language of public discourse has been vandalized by demagogues. The finance minister is right when he says that bad economics does not make good politics. But has he been able to get this message across to some of his own colleagues in the government? There was no sign in the railway budget of its having reached Mamata Banerjee. Or did the presiding deity at the Rail Bhavan consign it to the wastepaper basket? Why did the prime minister fight shy of making her do something to stop the process of decay of the railway system? One wishes that some of the finance minister's budgetary calculations turn out to be correct, that he will be able to reduce the fiscal deficit from 5.1 per cent to 4.7 per cent of the gross national product, somehow contain the inflationary pressure and ensure an economic growth rate of 6.5 per cent to 7 per cent in the next financial year. But there is no convincing evidence in the budget to show that resources on the scale needed to create conditions for a growth rate of 9 per cent over a long period will be forthcoming. As for the grim problem of growing unemployment, the finance minister has maintained a discreet silence. Yashwant Sinha is justly proud of having had the spunk to go ahead with the second phase of the liberalization programme. He has undertaken to launch a more vigorous privatization drive, which is slated to bring Rs 12,000 crore into the government's kitty. And he is prepared to stick his neck out in taking on the trade unions in a bid to extend the area in which to try out a hire-and-fire labour policy. Unfortunately, it will be tough going for him on both these fronts. The Balco muddle shows that parliamentary approval of a deal is not enough to convince the public that everything is above board in the absence of greater transparency and more stringent procedures for valuation and closer scrutiny of bids. There may be no cause to suspect any foul play in this case. The trouble is that this is not how the government of Chhattisgarh, where one of Balco's plants is situated, feels about it. Indeed the chief minister, Ajit Jogi, speaks of a huge kickback and has even promised to name the guilty person before a joint parliamentary committee if one is appointed to go into the pros and cons of the deal. Even the Balco workers refuse to buy the government's story and have gone on strike to register their protest. The charge that the transfer of tribal land is in violation of a Supreme Court judgment adds a new dimension to the controversy. If this murky affair proves anything, it is that there is something seriously wrong with the rules of the privatization game. If the Balco deal falls through as a result of political wrangles or legal tangles, the prospective buyers of shares in other public sector ventures will be all the more wary, and the total amount received by the government by sale of public sector units may not add up to even half the budgeted sum. There is still enough time to streamline all the procedures and save privatization from turning into a fiasco. If one main prop of the new phase of the liberalization programme is increasing privatization of public sector units, the other is a more flexible labour policy. As things are, the second, like the first, is beset by uncertainties, putting the whole business in jeopardy. The change in labour policy faces a major political hurdle because the necessary legislation to give it effect will need the approval of both houses of Parliament and the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government does not have a majority in the Rajya Sabha. This is why the finance minister is so keen to secure the cooperation of the Congress and remind it of its moral obligation not to obstruct the passage of a measure which is a logical continuation of the policy initiated by it. Whether the Congress will earn the hostility of trade unions just to oblige a party which opposed it tooth and nail while it was trying to save the economy from going over the brink, remains to be seen. But during a television discussion on the budget, when Yashwant Sinha talked of the need for a broader consensus, Manmohan Singh asked, sharply, how often the present finance minister sought the advice of his predecessor during the last three years. He had a point, since consensus-building implies mutual trust and frequent exchange of views in search of common ground, particularly with regard to problems permitting no soft options. In any case, the present government cannot use the Congress as a scapegoat and blame the main opposition party for its own failures to set matters right. The mistakes made by the Congress need to be judged in the light of the policy prescriptions of other groups at the time, that carried the seeds of disruption and would have made the state weaker and more vulnerable to outside pressures. Did not Jayaprakash Narayan for long try to sell General Ayub Khan's phoney basic democracy as a better system than the one in force here? The Congress could retain its hegemony for so long only because it was able to resolve the differences between the Centre and the states at the party level, having a sufficiently large, often decisive, presence in every part of the country. Yet, it failed to develop a political culture dynamic enough to take up the challenges of the ongoing technological revolution, and failed to change its economic course even after many of its much less developed neighbours in southeast Asia had forged ahead of it. It took the government too long to get out of the trap of a measly growth rate of 3.5 per cent a year, which could neither make any dent in mass poverty nor spare enough resources to invest in education and healthcare or in improving the general conditions of living. Ironically enough, the higher growth rate of the reform period has widened, not narrowed, the income disparities not only between regions but also between individuals. Meanwhile, the globalization forces are fragmenting political life in multi-ethnic societies into ever smaller bits and destabilizing governments which are often forced to act against their better judgment under pressure from allies at home and from self-appointed managers of the new world order abroad. The crucial parts of the economic reforms process cannot but have a rough passage both in and outside Parliament, when so many demagogues, with a say in Central government, are not above using all sorts of devious means to stall changes which go against the grain of their populist thinking or compromise their public image in their regional, communal or caste constituencies. Before the finance minister sets out to build a national consensus on the hard decisions he has taken, he should strive to achieve a greater cohesion in the thinking of the sangh parivar and the ruling alliance. The opposition of the trade union which owes allegiance to his own party, to the proposed change in the labour laws ought to remind him that consensus-building too, like charity, begins at home.