When Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced a hike in excise duty on petrol and diesel during his budget speech in Lok Sabha on Friday, members of opposition parties staged a walkout together in a rare show of unity. Later, the united opposition slammed the government for introducing an inflationary measure in the Union budget at a time when food prices had risen by nearly 20 percent over the past year and more. A hike in fuel prices, especially in the case of diesel which powers trucks, increases cost of transportation of goods including food products, fuelling inflation.

Opposition parties, ranging from Bharatiya Janata Party to the Left parties and Lalu Prasad's Rashtriya Janata Dal, threatened to stall the functioning of parliament unless the government announced a rollback in the proposed hike in excise duty.

Even as the government has failed miserably in containing the runaway rise in food prices, though, shouldn't the opposition have waited for its turn for an exhaustive discussion on the budget later in the House? Should the opposition always choose the easier way out of walking out on an unacceptable proposal from the government rather than coming up with a compelling alternate strategy of its own to deal with the situation? Why can't the opposition unite instead to force the government to debate the budget more thoroughly than has been done in the recent past? Is the opposition justified, then, in boycotting the budget speech?