Coming on top of its defeat in the municipal elections in Maharashtra, and the reverses it suffered in the recent elections in Punjab, Uttaranchal, Manipur and elsewhere, the Congress party’s failure to hold on to an already unimpressive share of the vote in UP despite the re-invigorating presence of Rahul Gandhi, has made many political analysts conclude that the UPA government has already become something of a lame duck in New Delhi. The post-election honeymoon with the voter is long over and the anti-incumbency wave has surfaced again.
If nothing impedes its build-up in the next two years, Maharashtra, Andhra and Tamil Nadu could well go back to the NDA; Karnataka could slip entirely out of the Congress’ grasp; and Punjab could stay out. It is no longer certain that the Left will be able to hold Bengal and Kerala. Even if anti-incumbency works in favour of the UPA in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, this will not be sufficient to bring it back to power.
The mere fact that such calculations are being made shows quickly, with the advent of coalition governments, anti-incumbency has become the main arbiter of the fate of governments. It is also one over which any Central government has limited control, for the anti-incumbency cycle is different in different states. Gaining or losing power is increasingly becoming dependent on the convergence and divergence of these cycles.
If the anti-incumbency factor has appeared on the UPA’s political horizon it has done so because the Congress has not  made enough of a difference to peoples’ lives to prevent the political pendulum from beginning to swing away from it again. On the face of things, this is a puzzling development. Hasn’t the economy grown at almost 9 per cent a year for the last three years? If the live register of job-seekers is anything to go by, hasn’t there been an actual fall in the number of non-agricultural unemployed? While it may not have enacted new economic reforms, hasn’t the UPA at least prevented the Left from turning the clock back on past reforms? And above all, having inherited a reviving economy, does the Manmohan Singh government not deserve some credit for knowing when to leave a good thing alone?
The reason for the revival of the anti-incumbency factor is the exact opposite of what analysts within the party are saying. It is not its failure to tackle inherited causes of inequality and poverty in the country. It is its surprising insensitivity to  the impoverishment of those who had deemed themselves secure, that is resulting from the acceleration of economic growth, and the growing integration of the Indian with the world economy. The truth is that within the past three years the economy has been polarised into the haves and the have-nots at a pace that even the least politically sensitive villager cannot fail to notice.
Let me run through a few examples that will highlight the change. The decision to acquire land for SEZs sent a shock wave through the rural community across the length and breadth of India. Faced with an unprecedented agitation the government hastily withdrew and decided to let the market decide the price in future. But in the same enactment it carefully refrained from curtailing even the tiniest bit, the right of government organisations to acquire land for dams, power stations, roads, coal, bauxite iron ore and other mines, despite the fact that these will require 20 times as much land as the SEZs. What is more, faced with a gathering revolt among the tribals and forest dwellers who will be worst affected, its uni-track response has been to strengthen the coercive apparatus of the state police.
In Chhattisgarh, were the Maoists are recruiting the immiserised at the rate of thousands every month, it has sent K P S Gill as the security advisor. Chhattisgarh is recruiting, or covertly encouraging counter-Maoist’s to attack the Maoists.  Apparently, the Union home ministry believes that what worked against a fringe group of 500 to 2,000 secessionists in Punjab preaching a course that no Sikh wanted to adopt, will work against hundreds of thousands of desperately poor people who are being drawn to an armed struggle because they believe that the state has forsaken them.
Let us now look at the cities. Profits have soared, and since the late 90s managerial salaries have grown by 13 to 30 per cent a year. The urban gini coefficient has therefore almost certainly risen, and this is reflected in the rapid emergence of a lifestyle that can cause nothing but envy. But at the other end, the central and state government of Delhi stood by, wringing their hands but doing nothing, while an increasingly right wing supreme court ordered demolitions of “unauthorised” construction that cost several lakhs of people their jobs. So insensitive is our new, abrasive, “globalised” middle class that while newspapers reported incessantly on the resistance of those profiteering merchants, not one correspondent bothered to focus on the plight of the salaried working class and on the daily wage earners in the unorganised sector.
It suffices to say that the government measures to balance growth with equity had an archaic, Stalinist flavour even in the Common Minimum Programme. They embodied no new administrative or philosophical departures so no one expected them to work any better than the hundreds of thousands of crores spent on similar programmes in the past. What the poor need in an economy where the pace of change has accelerated is security. And that is the furthest thing from our central ministers’ minds.