A Mirror To The CMP.

(From Business Today (India))

Byline: Ashish Gupta

See the worthies in the picture above (that, in turn, has seen some use)? They are members of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) that runs the government, or representatives of parties supporting it from the outside; the turbaned individual near the left corner, Comrade Harkishen Singh Surjeet of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), is one such. The slim unimpressive looking document the people in the photograph hold in their hands is the Common Minimum Programme (CMP), a sort of vision statement for governance created after taking into account the ideologies of the 15 parties that constitute the UPA. At the time, most economic analysts believed that the CMP would cramp Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's reformist-style, although the man himself claimed that it gave him enough leeway to do what was required.

It turns out that he was right. The influence of the CMP, now called the National Common Minimum Programme or NCMP, is evident in Budget 2004. ''(It is), fully faithful to the NCMP,'' is how Chidambaram himself has described the Budget. And why wouldn't it be? He referred to the NCMP only around 20 times in his 110-minute speech.

That is not to mean the FM let himself be constrained by the letter of the NCMP. In a couple of instances, he has adhered to the spirit, but stretched the letter a bit, often at the risk of ...