Managing Voter Perception

The following is an excerpt from the book, "India Unmade: How the Modi Government Broke the Economy" by Yashwant Sinha. 

Sometimes even a benign measure can have adverse consequences, like the national highway project. I later found that in 2004 we lost all the constituencies that lay along the Grand Trunk Road that goes from West Bengal and through Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab up to the Pakistan border. It was a paradox. The highways programme was the Vajpayee government's most outstanding project - his enduring legacy, the accomplishment now cited by even his staunchest political opponents - so we should have won in those very constituencies. We lost, however, because all highway encroachers were evicted. Even in my constituency of Hazaribagh, removing encroachers made a lot of voters angry. This is the political reality of India.

There is thus an argument to be made that there is no correlation between good work and getting re-elected. Any correlation is the first fallacy of punditry. Voting is only marginally connected to the work you might have done, or the government you were a part of. It is dependent on many other factors which may or may not work in your favour. 

The biggest factor is managing voter perception, a fact of which the Modi government is obviously keenly aware. Take the election in 1989, in which V.P.Singh overtook Rajiv Gandhi as Mr Clean because the Congress prime minister was bogged down by the Bofors scandal. Chandra Shekar as prime minister used to wonder out loud to me that V.P.Singh as Rajiv's finance minister had to have given approval to the Bofors gun procuremenet. Yet he was never stained by the scandal. Rajiv Gandhi's defeat by V.P.Singh was thus a result of perception management.