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Making Sense of Indias Democratic
Choice
Vol - XLIX No. 24, June 14, 2014 | Sayori Ghoshal
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The 2014 Lok Sabha elections has witnessed, during the course of campaigns, heightened
emotionsstrong outbursts and heated exchanges. The declaration of the election result was
accompanied by both despair and jubilation. Both emotions have been caused by exactly the
same eventthe unanticipated landslide victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
spearheaded by its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. Despair and fear reign
because one remembers the 2002 communal violence that marked Modis rule as chief
minister in Gujarat as well as the demolition of the Babri masjid in 1992 when the BJP was in
power in Uttar Pradesh. Yet the jubilation cannot be denied. The jubilation arises from the
expectation that Modi, the man India has chosen, can deliver development and good
governance A lot of statistical data questions the viability of promises made by Modi, but the
majority[1] has given its verdict in his favour.
There is a need for making sense of the choice that India has made democratically, especially
for those despairing at the election result. The despair, I contend, is the more intense of the
two primary emotions; for this segment of population, voting for a party had less relevance
than voting against one. With the coming to power of the BJP, the one party this segment had
voted against, going beyond the results and critically analysing the developments becomes
essential to resist the political culture that Modi and his party epitomises.
Limitations of Democracy
Despite feelings of fear and despair, my contention is that this election result has made
possible a critical inroad into engaging with democracy; not with the technicalities of the
democratic process, but rather with its substance and, more significantly, with its limitations.
Most exchanges and expressions on social networking sites seem to suggest that, for people
who felt let down by the result, democracy has failed. The general belief is that democracy
gets seriously undermined if elections have not been conducted by fair means. And when the
party one supports wins, one believes that democracy has won.
This time, however, it is most essential that people who are far from excited about Indias
choice, recognise that democracy has indeed won. If ever democracy has succeeded in
post-Independence India, it has been in this election. Democracy, which is significantly not
about power to the people but about power to the majority, has crowned Modi as its choice.
There is no failure in this.
Democracy has, however, also succeeded in defining its own limit; its limit as an ethical
statement. For the majority, democracy continues to function unhindered and it continues to
express, choose and live freely; but it no longer implies that the majoritarian choice is
equivalent to an ethical course of action for the entire people. It is in testing this limit,
interrogating and engaging with it that we can move beyond despair; we can then examine
Making Sense of Indias Democratic Choice
what the substance of democracy implies and whether it can per se be the ultimate
determinant of our ethics.
The campaign against Modi and the BJP asked people to remember the 2002 Gujarat riots
which took place under Modis watch and the Babri masjid demolition in 1992 in Ayodhya
under BJPs rule in Uttar Pradesh. The anti-Modi discourse also stressed that the purported
Gujarat development model was just a myth and needed to be busted. Without giving up on
the importance of either contention, it can be suggested that perhaps it is not a mere absence
of memory, a forgetting of histories, that caused people to vote for the BJP. Perhaps, the
choice was exercised in full presence of these and other such memories. For the jubilant
majority of India, these memories played a lesser role in their decision-making. The 2014
election result then could mean either: the more common suggestion that the majority has
forgotten history or, the far more dangerous one, that this majority remembers but has
deemed these and such memories irrelevant.
The imagination of democracy as peoples voice, power and agency and the natural
conclusion that it is therefore ethical for all has been challenged by the majoritys choice in
this election. A government has been elected that makes a number of minority groups (of
gender, sexuality, religion, and caste as well as number of individuals beyond the scope of
group identities) feel threatened and unsafe.
Such a foregrounding of democracys limitation becomes crucial at a time when majority and
morality are evidently no longer interchangeable.[2] And yet, the reverence for the logic of
democracy per se remains intact. Even among critics of the election result, democracy seems
to be the sacrosanct justificatory logic that remains outside the scope of investigation and
argumentation. A sensitive and concise article by actor and film maker Nandita Das also
reflects the uncritical reverence that accompanies the imagination of democracy: The
election of a new government in India is the result of a democratic exercise so vast that any
critique of the mandate needs to be respectful.[3] However this respect often becomes
indistinguishable from uncritical acceptance.
The lack of reverence for democracy I invoke here is to enable one to question not the
outcome of this election but the assumed ultimate supremacy of the logic of democracy. Many
reasons have been cited regarding the historic nature of this election (maximum turnout of
voters, single party winning an absolute majority for the first time since 1984 and so on); but
most historic is perhaps the spectacular show of democracys limitation. The limitation lies in
the majority becoming the ultimate factor in deciding everything that has implications not only
for itself but for the minorities as well. The majoritys choice is considered too sacred to be
scrutinised and too representational to be considered unethical.
You Get What You Deserve!
Among the despairing voter population, one mode of justification of the unanticipated outcome
is the self-flagellating logic of having received what one deserves. This is counterproductive,
and even regressive, for the continuance of resistance to the model of governance that India
has gifted itself. In the assumption of the logic of getting what one deserves, there is a certain
degree of complacency and, perhaps, even fatalism. Ironically, in this context, this logic
assumes that with the triumph of the majoritys choice, the resistance of the minorities is a lost
cause.
The necessity in the wake of such a triumph is to keep alive the healthy skepticism,
resistance, and concerns of the minorities. And to keep these alive, it becomes indispensable
that one asks larger questions of democracy and ethics, where they converge and where they
part ways. Finally, it becomes fundamental to understand whether todays majority has
Making Sense of Indias Democratic Choice
forgotten histories (here especially of communal violence) or whether its democratic right has
been exercised despite these memories. For this majority, these memories seem insignificant
and communal violence seems justified in a secretly male, Hindu and brahminical India. If
the latter is the more accurate understanding of todays majority, it becomes all the more
necessary that we begin to understand Indias majoritarian psyche.
Notes
[1] Unless otherwise mentioned, in this article I have used majority and minority not to
mean empirical, identity-based groups such as Hindus and Muslims respectively. Rather,
majority here indicates those who voted in favour of the BJP and minority indicates those who
did not. Therefore, majority could include those who based on religious or other identities
belong to minority communities; and minority in this piece could well include people who
belong to dominant religion/caste/gender but have resisted the rise of the BJP through their
voting rights.
[2] See Javed Anand (2014): Sorry, World, We Tried, The Indian Express, 17 May, available
at http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/sorry-world-we-tried/, accessed on 28
May 2014.
[3] See Nandita Das (2014): Silence is Deafening: Are My Fears Unfounded?, Outlook, 26
May, available at http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?290737, accessed on 28 May
2014.

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Making Sense of Indias Democratic Choice