Paper short abstract:

Such a foregrounding of democracy's limitation becomes crucial at a time when "majority" and "morality" are evidently no longer interchangeable. And yet, the reverence for the logic of democracy per se remains intact.

Paper long abstract:

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.