Sinha's problem is that he has to mollify the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh lobby, the corporate world, and the Bharatiya Janata Party -- which has to face a series of upcoming elections. In the process, obviously, he can only upset each of them. The buzz in North Block's corridors is that whether or not the Government remains in power when Budget-time arrives in 2000, Sinha could be history.

The country could be in for the most flatulent Budget in more than a decade, surpassing the 1987 low established by then Finance Minister N D Tiwari. His concept of fiscal wizardry was to raise taxes on bindis.

Swadeshi not sweet to Nestle NRIs
The swadeshi brigade, of course, has made Sinha miserable. Take the recent case of Nestle India. The multinational giant wanted to expand its India operations and increased its corporate strength from 5 employees at its headquarters to 25. That would be good news. But, there's a catch. Nestle brought in honchos who were "outsiders". Though most were NRIs, they were still not 100 per cent swadeshi. The five supplemented complained to Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi.

Joshi, the pin-up boy of the hardcore RSS, was irate. He has exerted pressure on pathetic Sinha to include a provision in the Budget to prevent such occurrences. Everyone is confused by this turn of events. After all, isn't this the party which has constantly asserted that it's NRI-friendly and wants to extend them special privileges like a dual nationality? And what about all those dollars that have been flowing in from Friends of BJP shakhas in the US and England?

So why did they appoint him in the first place anyway?
Shaking the finance firmament has been Mohan Guruswamy's exit from the post of Advisor to the Finance Minister. Guruswamy has carefully planted stories on willing hacks that he had "resigned" since he could not stomach the swadeshi/videshi jhagra, and that he was anguished over the recent attacks on Christians. No one actually believes him. A former VP Singh admirer and Janata Dal afficianado, Guruswamy, hardly blinked before hopping on to the BJP bandwagon. And, the Finance Ministry, especially Sinha, who is equally aghast, has stressed that Guruswamy had been "fired".

Why? Good question. The reasons appear to be many. First, the intriguing case of Essar Steel. Guruswamy had apparently been pressurising financial institutions into bailing out the ailing steel major with loans worth nearly Rs 1700 crore. Big money, bigger trouble. The FIs were stunned; they had been directed by the Ministry not to pour scarce funds into dubious investments of which Essar certainly was one.

So, the chiefs of the Unit Trust of India, the Life Insurance Corporation, the Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI), et al, protested to Sinha. And Guruswamy, who had leaked details of the Essar bailout to journalists earlier, was packing his bags. Not only that, Guruswamy was also trying to assuage a section of the BJP (the lunatic fringe), by "persuading" IDBI into propping up the tottering though saffron-tinged Delhi daily, The Pioneer. It didn't make much economic sense, but then playing politics rarely does.

Knotty Nandu
If Guruswamy is out, Nandu K Singh, shunted from the Finance Ministry and then upgraded as Secretary in the Prime Minister's office, is still around and doing his bit to do unto the economy whatever little Sinha's team hasn't managed. Singh owns the distinction of having put off Sinha, former Finance Secretary Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the incumbent Vijay Kelkar, the Revenue Secretary Javed Chaudhry and Expenditure Secretary EAS Sarma. But given his political talents, he has survived, though the economy may not, courtesy Nandu.

He was behind the decision taken to increase the retirement age of bureaucrats from 58 to 60, convincing the political-powers-that-be, who thereby understand little about money except the wads in brown envelopes, that this was the panacea to India's economic health. Big deal. All it has done is to have stave of the inevitable and demoralised the middle-rung bureaucracy. The bill still has to be paid.

Another goddamned mess
Raising the retirement age, of course, was among a welter of Pay Commission recommendations, many of which were cleared by the previous United Front regime. The BJP-led sarkar finds it convenient to blame the UF Government of having created that gargantuan economic shambles by raising the pay-packets of a bureaucracy that is bloated, incompetent and inactive. Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram has been telling confidants about how BJP's leaders, at that time, were screaming to up the salaries of the babus.

In fact, Chidambaram maintains that he informed present Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that his was the "Government-in-waiting" and pushing for such a measure would create quicksand that the BJP would find it difficult to extricate itself from. And, chief ministers of various states, doing their populist bit, also shouted for the implementation of the recommendation. Not, of course, the rational ones which would have balanced the financially suicidal hike.

Moves like across-the-board cuts in recruitment, abolishing vacant posts, reducing posts. No, no, people like NK Singh, having their own constituency within the babudom, stymied anything logical and constructive. So, now, the state governments are yelping for help since they say the snowballing effect of the recommendations threaten their sarkars with bankruptcy.