Budget 2018: Populism was always on the cards, and Arun Jaitley duly delivered

And so on.

All this came at a cost of fiscal slippage, revealed in the decidedly more measured second half of the speech – the fiscal deficit target is 3.3% in 2018-19. A hit to investors through the introduction of long-term capital gains tax and a tax on mutual funds, even if prefaced by a pious acknowledgement of how important markets are to a vibrant economy, went down badly.

The BJP is a party that’s perennially in election mode, and there are several large prizes to be won this year. It faces a mix of incumbency and, variously, Jat and Rajput unrest, farmer agitations, and Naxalism in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Karnataka offers it a beachhead in a part of the country that has traditionally not cared for its Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva message. And the Northeastern states up for grabs are small but significant gemstones that the BJP would want atop its saffron turban.

To be fair, the party has muscled its way to power in 19 out of 29 Indian states without resorting to overt and obvious populism, other than the promise of farm loan waivers. This time, however, there was too much at stake with the 2019 Lok Sabha elections clearly visible on the horizon.

One thing worth remembering: the most populist move this government has made in its 44 months in office came well outside the purview of the Budget. When Modi got on television to announce demonetisation on November 8, 2016, he started the process of redefining the BJP’s core constituency from the trader to the poor. The poor may have been inconvenienced by the note ban, but they led difficult lives any way, and the sign of the rich queuing up to withdraw scarce cash from ATMs, and the stories of corrupt businessmen and politicians throwing now useless currency notes into rivers may have contributed to the BJP’s biggest electoral success in this term, its win in the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls.

In the coming 12 months, it may pay to expect the unexpected: The BJP has a huge majority in the Lok Sabha, but it endured a scare in the Gujarat elections. And, at the time of writing, it was performing poorly in by-polls in Rajasthan. There is a serious jobless growth problem in a country that needs to add a million jobs a month, oil prices are on the uptick and the economy continues to be at the mercy of the monsoon. A strong element of  populism in the Budget was always on the cards.