The feel-good factor is fine before the elections as long as the NDA keeps in mind that all elections are leaps into the unknown

Most people feel good about the act of giving. Generosity is always good massage for the ego. For some people, generosity is a reflection of feeling good. This applies to the National Democratic Alliance government which, as soon as it had made up its mind about early polls, has gone to town with a bag full of largesse. One obvious motivation is, of course, keeping people happy just before the polls. But the largesse serves to underline the feel-good factor and also to hype it up. The feel-good factor is the buzzword for this winter of India’s contentment. The conventional wisdom is that India has never had it so good and the stranglehold of the Hindu rate of growth has now decisively been broken. There is no denying that the fundamentals of the Indian economy are now firmer thanks to a decade of economic reforms and liberalization. Despite this, there are reasons to suspect that the feel-good factor is a product of good political management and of outstanding packaging by the government’s spin doctors. Among the latter are economists, who are self-appointed spokesmen for the government, who refuse to see reality beyond their noses.

The point about management and packaging suggests itself from a few simple facts. The projected high growth of the gross domestic product — on the principal pillars of the much-flaunted feel-good factor — is by no means unprecedented. In 1988-89, the GDP registered a growth of 10.5 per cent; in 1975-76 it came close to 9 per cent; and in 1967-68, the GDP growth was 8.1 per cent. On all three years, like the present one, the healthy GDP growth rode piggyback on high agricultural growth. But in none of the years — including the golden one of 1988-89, the only time when the GDP growth entered double digits — was the feel-good factor brought into play to gain political mileage. This is the NDA’s contribution to the Indian political scene. Economic achievements by themselves do not ensure electoral success, as Mr P.V. Narasimha Rao discovered in 1996 when he was defeated after recording a 7.5 per cent growth. Similarly, Rajiv Gandhi could not win in 1989 despite the economic performance of the previous year. With this history in mind, the NDA, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, has taken on the project of spreading the feel-good factor. Thus the largesse that is being rolled out.

There are two problems with this induced euphoria. One is that the feel-good factor is notoriously volatile. The winds of a dry monsoon can blow away the factor and all its putative gains. Thus the haste of the government to cash in on it immediately before unpredictable and unforeseen circumstances change the ambience. Second, there is the bigger and grimmer reality of India where there are millions of people who are outside even the penumbra of the feel-good factor. These are also voters and they have shown that GDP growth has no influence over their voting preferences. Elections in India, unlike in the West, still have imponderables. They are jumps into the unknown. The NDA and the BJP might discover that the meaning is not always in the message.