‘Let them eat chicken’

Another Darnomics novelty

Accountants can normally be forgiven for not exactly being up to scratch on history. Too much number crunching no doubt leaves little time for what might have been once upon a time. But a finance minister does not have the luxury of ignorance. Granted, profit and loss is, eventually, the sum total of his job. But the political nature of the assignment — not to mention the fact that millions of lives depend on his decisions, — means he must turn his attention, among other things, to not only end-prices of items, but also people’s ability to purchase them, especially essentials.

Or perhaps Dar sb has read just enough history to know that Marie Antoinette didn’t really say ‘let them eat cake instead’ when the French couldn’t afford bread (just before the Revolution); even though she did often go out of her way to impress her divorce from reality upon whoever would notice. Even so, he’s missed the parallel; then, as now, it was not supply constraint that was the problem, but people’s inability to afford staple food. So while an accountant might well give himself a pat on the back that chicken at Rs200 per kg (probably where he buys his chicken from) is better than daal maash at Rs260 per kg, a finance minister in touch with reality would know that the common man’s purchasing power affords neither at present rates.

That, of course, means that even subsistence living is spiraling out of the man-on-the-street’s reach. Dar sb has introduced a number of novelties in the last three years – from parking Saudi money in the central bank to shore up the rupee, to selling missed targets as achievements, to saying elbow room from exogenous factors was policy accomplishment. But of late his economic ideals have become increasingly eccentric. People, naturally, do not like such fact checks, especially when they come from the government. And while the world has, thankfully, changed a lot since the French queen got the guillotine for her oddness, people can still deliver severe sentences at the election. And the next one is not too far away.