Is India shining? Yes, but...

Admittedly, the middle of an economic slowdown and of a spurt in prices is not the best time to be shouting "Yippee!". But it is incomprehensible that the United Progressive Alliance and its government should take no notice at all of what they can claim as solid achievements.

Indeed, both seem determined to focus on failure rather than success, and to pass up every debating point. If ever a government and ruling coalition had a death wish, the present ones do.

Start with the performance of the economy. Its growth rate last year has been upped from 8.7 per cent to 9 per cent, taking the average rate of growth in the four years of the Manmohan Singh government to 8.9 per cent. I cannot think of any other government that would not make a bit of a noise about such stellar success, and draw comparisons with the record of its predecessor (5.9 per cent over six years) - showing a jump of 50 per cent.

Or take agriculture, whose annual growth during the UPA term has been 3.6 per cent -again a jump of nearly 50 per cent, and the best record since the 1980s. But the agriculture minister has not said a word, or pointed to any of the success stories.

Or take the criticism that has been bandied about for years that the economic reforms that began in 1991 have ushered in a period of "jobless growth". Well, the numbers just released on the basis of the Economic Census of 2005 say that employment grew by an annual rate of 2.78 per cent in the seven years since the previous census in 1998 - a rate of growth that is significantly better than the 1.75 per cent growth rate between 1990 and 1998.

Admittedly, 1998-2005 covers mostly the NDA period, but have any of the "reformers" in the government, including the three principal authors of the 1991 reform, cared to point out that the old charge of jobless growth has been disproved once and for all, and that the faster growth since 2005 will have seen even more job creation? Not on your life.

Or take the price question. The inflation rate has inched up to 8.24 per cent, and the government is on the back foot. But no one in the government has cared to point out that the inflation rate was 7.5-8 per cent in the summer of 2004 too, within weeks of the UPA government assuming office. And that if the BJP describes the 10 per cent price increase announced this week for petrol and diesel as "economic terror", what words would it use to describe the much bigger price increases announced when the BJP was in office?

This string of silences cannot be explained away as incompetence. There is a deeper problem, which is that the NDA went into the 2004 election with an "India Shining" campaign on the basis of 8.5 per cent growth in its final year, a campaign that Sonia Gandhi, the Congress and the Left decried for ignoring the harsh realities faced by the majority.

Having done that, the Congress and the UPA cannot bear to say today that the Indian economy is in fact "shining", that a sustained growth rate of 8.9 per cent has made India the toast of the world, and that rapid growth has created jobs, spread well-being and made a dent in poverty.

But even that is not a full explanation. The fact is that the Congress cares little for its Prime Minister (notice how it left him to fight alone after the petro-product price hikes were announced), and takes all cues from Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, both of whom are more interested in government hand-outs of various kinds than in economic reform. This is how feel-good becomes feel-bad.