The budget speech on 1st February by India's finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, attracted comment for a number of reasons. It's gone down as the longest ever budget speech - 2 hours and 41 minutes. And it included a snatch of verse in Kashmiri! Take a look -
The poet, as the finance minister acknowledges, was Dina Nath Kaul, more generally known as 'Nadim'. What Nirmala Sitharaman probably didn't realise is that when Nadim was writing of his 'pyara watan' or beloved homeland, that homeland was Kashmir not India. In the 1940s, Nadim was a leftist and an ally of Sheikh Abdullah, and one of his most renowned poems was a tribute to Sheikh Abdullah on his release from the maharajah's jail.
At the time of the budget speech, Sheikh Abdullah's son and grandson - both former chief ministers of Jammu & Kashmir and one of them the duly elected MP for Srinagar - have been under detention for six months.
LATER: It's been suggested that the Nadim poem from which the finance minister quoted was written in the 1950s for Republic Day, in which case the 'watan' in the poet's mind could have been India rather than Kashmir.
At the time of the budget speech, Sheikh Abdullah's son and grandson - both former chief ministers of Jammu & Kashmir and one of them the duly elected MP for Srinagar - have been under detention for six months.
LATER: It's been suggested that the Nadim poem from which the finance minister quoted was written in the 1950s for Republic Day, in which case the 'watan' in the poet's mind could have been India rather than Kashmir.
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