When people vote, are they really choosing wisely, or just getting bored of the old face and excited by a new one? Governments change, parties collapse, new heroes rise, yet the deeper problems remain the same. The article argues that elections often reveal not political maturity, but the restless ego constantly searching for a new object to cling to, without ever examining itself.
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 9 may '26
On the fourth of May, three sitting Chief Ministers lost power, and a film star became the likely next Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. The vocabulary that surrounded these results was, as always, ceremonial: "mandate," "popular verdict," "historic upheaval" тАФ words that imply an electorate exercising considered judgment. That courtesy is not incidental to electoral democracy; it is load-bearing. Without it, the ceremony would be required to account for itself more honestly, and that accounting, if attempted with any seriousness, might prove considerably more troubling than the results it would explain.
Mamata Banerjee, who had governed West Bengal for fifteen years with what her admirers called an unshakeable popular bond, lost her own seat at Bhavanipur as her party was reduced to roughly ninety-four seats in a 294-member assembly against the BJP's hundred and seventy-six. M.K. Stalin, carrying the full weight of Dravidian legacy and what the DMK had long described as an organic, almost civilisational connection with the Tamil voter, lost his own Kolathur seat to a TVK debutant in a contest that left a film actor's first-ever electoral formation leading in roughly a hundred and seven of two hundred and thirty-four seats. In Kerala, the last surviving bastion of organised left politics in India, the CPM collapsed to single digits and its ally the CPI to four, after a decade of consolidated dominance that had been read as the end of the state's alternation pattern. And in Tamil Nadu, the man who will in all likelihood be the next chief minister is Vijay, a film star who entered politics so recently that his manifesto is considerably newer than some of his blockbusters. The analysts called it a historic upheaval. A new phase of popular consciousness, one commentator ventured. The vocabulary worked overtime.
