India will make its democratic will known today. As results pour in from each corner, a narrative will emerge out of all these infinitesimal, important decisions made by individual voters. The turnout has broken all records in Indian history. While an election victory, particularly in a complex parliamentary system such as ours, is an aggregate of many different impulses rather than a single message, every new government interprets its own mandate to guide its forthcoming agenda. And all too often, they have got it wrong.
The UPA, for instance, could be accused of taking away the wrong message from its victories in both 2004 and 2009, reading them as a call to swing away from the logic of market economics, with its rights-based schemes and populist giveaways. In 2009 particularly, it disregarded the evidence that it had been overwhelmingly voted back by aspirational, urban Indians, and it treated their concerns as somehow suspect — a decision that rebounded badly. Now, the new formation at the Centre will have to carefully parse its victory, and respond without ideological blinkers. It may also have to keep in mind that winning an electoral majority is not a vindication of majoritarianism.
The other unmissable fact about this turnout is the emphatic presence of women, who outnumbered men in 16 out of the total 35 states and Union territories. For too long, women’s votes have underwritten men’s decisions. Now there is a glimmer of a chance that national politics is beginning to acknowledge gender issues more seriously. The question is whether that conversation will remain limited to a patriarchal one of safety and dignity alone, or whether it will encompass the vital questions of women’s agency and autonomy as full citizens and political agents. The new government will have to shape itself to these constituencies, before all else.
