Has Maharashtra withstood the assaults that democracy has seen?

The results today will show whether the parties indulging in corrupt practices have won or whether the electorate has not sold its vote

- ABHAY MOKASHI

Even as the people await the results of the legislative assembly elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand and the by-polls in Uttar Pradesh and Kerala, one result is out and that is on the state of our democracy. There has been a great assault on democracy.

From the advent of electoral democracy in India, cases of wooing the electorate by offering them goodies have been witnessed, but that was done on a micro level and did not affect the electoral results in a great way.

Attempts to divide the electorate on religious grounds have also been made time and again since the first election in Independent India, but that too did not have a great impact on the voters in the initial years. Political parties, which primarily appealed for votes on religious lines, did not get great success in the elections.

It was only in the 1980s that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), soon after its formation, started playing the Hindutva card, garnishing it with the Ram Mandir issue. The bloody riots in Gujarat in 2002, followed by projection of the state's Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, as a saviour of Hindus and as an effective administrator with his much publicised Gujarat model, helped the party in coming to power and making Modi the Prime Minister.