This week's " Poke Me", invites your comments on Why the media & pundits are getting it wrong on reforms and politics . The feature will be reproduced on the edit page of the Saturday edition of the newspaper with a pick of readers' best comments.So be poked and fire in your comments to us right away. Comments reproduced in the paper will be the ones that support or oppose the views expressed here intelligently. Feel free to add reference links etc. in support of your comments.The Defenders of the Faith (DFs) who were hiding in their closets all these days are out again in full force. The recent decisions of the Government of India to cut subsidies by raising the prices of diesel and LPG , to invite FDI in retail and civil aviation and to disinvest shares in some PSUs have encouraged them to do what they have always done best namely, singing paeans of praise of the Government of India and specially the great reformer Dr. Manmohan Singh With these few decisions the paralysis of decision making is over, the Government and the country are back in business, all our economic ills are cured and we are back on the high growth path. As usual, the BJP has been target number one of these DFs for daring to oppose these ‘reforms’. Once again, we are being warned that by opposing these progressive measures specially FDI in retail we shall lose the support of the urban middle-class. There is a familiar ring to it.In 2005 when Dr. Manmohan Singh signed the nuclear deal with the USA and we opposed the agreement, this is exactly what we were told. Today, seven years later not a single megawatt of additional nuclear energy has been produced in the country as a result of that agreement; not a single reactor is in the process of being erected and even the earlier project at Kudamkulam is facing an unprecedented popular opposition. Is any one asking the government to explain? Our own impressive record of economic reforms between 1998- 2004 did not help us electorally and we lost all the Lok Sabha seats in Delhi and in other Metros.The Congress Party in opposition had been disrupting Parliament , opposing economic reforms, describing FDI in retail as anti-national but that did not prevent them from winning all the seats in Delhi. Just as the pollsters were wrong in their electoral predictions then; the DFs are wrong today. Sitting in their air conditioned studios in Delhi and asking participants in panel discussions “to tell the people of India” because “the nation wants to know”, these fat-salaried Caesars decide the fate of the country every evening without any knowledge of the reality on the ground. When did any of the DFs visit a village last, or the Prime Minister for that matter?The poor and the middles-classes are the worst victims of the persistent price-rise and the high interest rates this Government has unleashed on them. The huge hike in diesel prices with its cascading effect on prices of all products will leave them further distraught. The effective increase of almost Rs.175 on each cylinder even for a family which uses only 12 cylinders in a year will burn a further hole in their pocket. EMIs have already gone up sharply as a result of high interest rates and consumer durables and residential accommodation have already gone beyond the reach of the middle class. The DFs would like us to believe that none of these will ultimately matter; what will matter is the dream of the middle class to shop in the air conditioned comfort of a foreign multi-national retail chain. This one pleasure, as and when it comes, will make the middle class forget all its other woes and it will punish the BJP in the elections for opposing the fulfillment of this dream.The DFs forget that a hundred considerations weigh with the people when they go to vote. Those who have never contested popular elections will never understand the dynamics of these elections. No pundit has ever tried to explain why in the Lok Sabha elections of 2004, the BJP won 10 out of 11 seats in Chhattisgarh and lost 13 out of the 14 seats in the similarly placed adjoining State of Jharkhand. No pundit has ever explained why despite the massive national highway building programme of the NDA Government, the BJP lost all the 14 seats in 2004 which it had won in 1998 along National Highway No. 2 also famously known as the Sher Shah Suri Marg. These pundits are accountable to no one. Therefore, they are free to make their mistakes and move on.The tragedy of India is not the explosion that we have witnessed in the visual media. The tragedy is the complete disconnect that exists between the media and the reality on the ground. The plight of the people in the left wing extremism affected villages is not even the concern of the media at the district level unless something terrible happens. The hiatus between them and Delhi is even more alarming.This esteemed paper carried the screaming headline on September 17 announcing a ‘Feast of Reforms Ahead’. The details included proposals to make borrowing abroad easier, relaxation in the cost limit for external borrowings, and more measures to ease foreign flows into the stock markets. This is the fare of the ‘feast’.Is it wrong to conclude, therefore, that economic reforms for the DFs mean foreign investment and foreign investment alone. They have nothing to do with the life of the aam aadmi, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Life would be so much simpler if the DFs kept their counsel to themselves and allowed us to proceed with our work.