When the President opens the budget session of Parliament, which usually is also the first session of the new calendar year, with an address to the joint session of the two Houses, it provides the incumbent government to round up its record in office during the past year and outline its priorities for a new financial year. On Monday, President Pratibha Patil addressed the annual joint sitting for the first time. Perhaps, nobody would have any reasons to complain about what she said by way of delivering the speech that is authored by the Manmohan Singh government. The reason is that she said nothing that could be construed as controversial. If there can be a soft speech, this one qualifies to be one such. If one were to look for hints to specific policy initiatives that the government might be contemplating to spell out for the next one year in the annual budget in four days’ time, there isn’t any in this speech. The address is essentially an account of the UPA government’s almost four-year record in office. It has been presented in a political perspective that essentially sets out the ruling coalition’s electoral plank for the next general elections.

And, there is no mistake about that agenda. It is a story about the coalition’s “inclusive growth” approach to governance during its term in office thus far. The various development programmes were put in the overall context of the inclusive growth strategy and have created the necessary “architecture of inclusive growth.” No longer is there any attempt to attribute high growth to rapid reform measures in various sectors of the economy. The President is convinced that the average growth of almost 9 per cent during the past four years is due to the entry of the hitherto untouched population into the growth process. The President is confident that much higher budgetary allocations for agriculture, rural development, health and education during the 11th Plan period will further strengthen the inclusive growth process.

The President’s conclusion, therefore, is: the economy and the country are on the move and there must not be any space in this process for forces of intolerance, chauvinism, extremism and the ideologies of exclusiveness and hatred. This is the closest the address came to making a political statement. It is not surprising then that the President confined herself to merely expressing a hope of concluding the contentious Indo-US nuclear deal while other contentious domestic and foreign policy issues found no mention at all.