FM Nirmala Sitharaman, who has presented a record-breaking seven consecutive full-fledged Budgets, plus an Interim one, walks into the newsroom of one of the most reputed national English daily, which is attended by respected and renowned editors, including N. Ram, the old-guard journalist-media owner of the Bofors fame. What do you expect? Intellectual fireworks. Exchange of insightful opinions. Fiery and intense discussion on Indian and global economies. Talks on how her seminal tax-saving Budget for the middle class, which was delivered a few weeks ago, could change the socioeconomics of Indian society. Well, some of these did happen during the FM’s 50-minute talk at The Hindu’s Chennai headquarters. But the main takeaway, as revealed by some of the attendees, was a dispute, a cartoon-caricature, which forced
Sitharaman to explode into anger during the subsequent discussion. She complained that the newspaper, which is dubbed as the Indian newspaper of record, just like the NYT is for America, had unnecessarily depicted her in a distasteful way in one of the caricatures, which showed her as an FM who blinked. To quickly salvage the situation, one of the editors surfed the newspaper’s website on his phone and pointed out that the cartoon had more than a million views, which proved that the readers loved it. As reported This angered the FM, and a furious Sitharaman flung the phone on the table. The audience was stunned; even Ram had never witnessed this behaviour from a senior central minister.
It is a possibility that the FM did not lose her cool but was making two crucial economic points. Her zero-tax announcement for annual personal incomes up to Rs 12 lakh (or Rs 12.75 lakh for salaried people) in Budget 2025 implied that the editor could easily buy a new phone with the extra disposable income. In the same budget, she reduced custom duty on mobile, which would make smart phones cheaper, and more affordable, especially for the deflated editor. Or we can look at the incident in another way – FM Nirmala Sitharaman can say, and do, no wrong. And no one, not even an editor of The Hindu, dare question her.
