A seasoned politician, equally at ease with economic and political matters of state, Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee has sent out feelgood signals while charting an opaque course of action in a zero-sum budget. The politics is easily explained: four states are set to go to polls within three months. As for the economics, Pranab serves up some neatly packaged lip service to balancing the books, riddled with assumptions. Given that this is the second full budget of UPA-II, Pranab