Electoral Democracy and the Ennobling Social

On the brighter side, the electoral results of the recently held Delhi assembly elections are an expression of the promise of sound electoral democracy; democracy that can be sustained by taking developmental agendas seriously. Delhi election results have sought to decisively expose the ­political forces which, through divisive electoral politics, sought to privilege the sectarian agenda over the developmental aspirations of the electorate. Thus, the Delhi’s assembly elections showed a definite shift from the parochial electoral mobilisation to a secular/developmental agenda, which seems to have helped the Aam Aadmi Party to register its landslide victory.

In fact, electoral results of the recently held assembly elections in Maharashtra and, more significantly, in Jharkhand have also shown the limits of communal mobilisation of the electorate by the right-wing parties. Arguably, these electoral results underline and renew (in the case of Jharkhand) the positive correlations between the progressive social character and the need for social spending that expects political parties’ exclusive focus on people’s concrete problems, such as drinking water, unemployment, education, and health. It is needless to mention that such a shift involves the moral principle of responsibility on the part of the political parties, which, with the force of political will, are committed to stir the electorate along the fair distri­bution of the fruits of development. Political parties have this exceptional degree of responsibility to establish positive correlations between ruling government and social spending. This responsibility principle was centrally underscored in the essay by Abhijit Banerjee, Amory Gethin and Thomas Piketty that was published in the ­Economic & Political Weekly last year (“Growing Cleavages in India?: Evidence from the Changing Structure of Electorates, 1962–2014,” 16 March 2019).