How does one measure the feel good factor? Are Indians truly in a positive mode or is it just media hype? How does a rising rupee, a booming economy actually affect the common man? Or is there mere journalistic cynicism? After all, there must be something in the air if Indian cricketers beat Australia in Australia, and Indian hockey players make defeating Pakistan a habit, not chance!
The tangibles are all there: the BSE-500 has risen over 100 percent in the last eight months, making it a world-beater. Business confidently predicts a growth at greater than 7 per cent of GDP (the last time this happened was in 1996, and even then, it was 6.8 percent); the monsoon was good, so much so that dry Rajasthan saw excessive water!
Then, for the chattering classes, who are obsessed with beating Pakistan in war and China in economic growth, the good news was a flurry of articles questioning China's high growth and praising India's solid performance. Economists of varied hues and financial giants like Goldman Sachs and others said India was the country to invest in.
A few years ago, Indian industrialists were crying hoarse about foreign competition eating them alive. The so-called Bombay Club kept talking about how foreigners have it easy (cheaper finance from abroad, huge economies of scale) while poor they had to pay excise and more interest. There was a phrase used then: 'level-playing field'. Guess what? That phrase has disappeared. When was the last time you heard it?
Here credit is due to all our finance ministers -- starting from the redoubtable Manmohan Singh to P C Chidambaram to Yashwant Sinha, and finally Jaswant Singh, and to their prime ministers who stayed the course -- that economic reforms never buckled to the industry lobby. Instead, forced to restructure and undergo painful changes, industry emerged whoppingly strong. It is no longer IT but the 'old economy' of bricks and mortar that is fuelling India's growth.
Earlier, some warned that Chinese goods would flood India. They came, they stayed, and most of them disappeared. Chinese bikes and televisions made little headway. Only Chinese toys sell in India (they sell all over the world!). And in return, China has been importing huge amounts of Indian steel and fears dumping by Indians. The two Asian giants have agreed to border trade and started direct international flights. Even politically, the two are closer than ever before since 1962: the Chinese and Indian navies held a joint exercise off the Shanghai coast
To talk about IT and pharma would be to go over well-covered ground, but to summarise, India appears to have a head start in the 21st century's sunshine industry. Studies now predict, in fact, simply state: by 2050, India's economy, currently less than half a trillion will the third largest, just behind China and the US.
For the middle class, inflation has remained under control even as the economic growth presents ever-increasing opportunities.
The never-ending dispute with Pakistan took an apparently decisive turn towards peace when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee decided to go where no one else has before: he made offers that left everyone gasping. The first was when road links were resumed. And off the very first bus from Lahore got off a little girl, all of two, with an ailing heart. She came for surgery to Bangalore and India prayed along with her parents for her speedy recovery. The outpouring of emotion did not go unnoticed in Pakistan. And not much later, Pakistan Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Jamali offered the olive branch.
Vajpayee went further: he offered not just rail links in Punjab, he suggested rail links