The irony could not be missed. Karnataka voted against corruption and mis-governance, and brought the Congress to power. But isn’t it the Congress that, as the leading party of the UPA, has given us an unprecedented series of corruption cases, scandals and taken governance to a new low?

Also read: BJP pays price for putting power before principles
Karnataka didn't vote against graft, it outed bad governance

The BJP in the state, then, must have done something stupendously wrong to force people to back the grand old party. The irony was that the day the people of Karnataka booted a corrupt BJP regime out of power and brought in the Congress, the grand old party’s government in Delhi was getting a stick from the supreme court for the most exceptional kind of bungling and lying before the court.

In no uncertain terms did the apex court tell the CBI that it ought not to have shown even the draft of the probe report on coal block allocation scam, let alone get it vetted by law minister Ashwani Kumar and at least two officers — of the coal ministry and the prime minister’s office.

The Karnataka assembly election results, declared on May 8, means the average voter was left with no option but to put the stamp of approval for the Congress. It also means they expect very little from the incoming government. That is poverty of our electoral system. That also explains why the Congress has gone on to win a series of assembly elections in the past couple of years even as the government it leads in New Delhi has been facing charges of bigger and bigger scandals.

The mood in Delhi and other metros, as seen in the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, is more and more anti-Congress, and yet the party pockets Assam and Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and now Karnataka (it has also lost in Goa, Gujarat, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere at the same time).

How do we explain this? At a superficial level, the argument would be that the state-specific factors, as well as anti-incumbency, are at play, and that the national elections will be a different arena. In which case, the Congress has no hope of winning in 2014.

At a deeper level, however, voters have been forced to choose between the corrupt and more corrupt, mis-governance and more mis-governance. They end up giving rotating terms to the same two or three players. The more things change, as they say, the more they remain the same. Not that voters are disillusioned and disinterested: their turnouts are only increasing in recent years, signifying their desperate quest for good governance. But the supply side has its limitations, the choices are restricted.

In such a scenario, winning elections is not about responding to voters’ aspirations but about getting the marketing strategy right, getting caste equations and poll-eve wheeling-dealing right — honourable exceptions like Bihar 2010 apart.

Blame it on the first-past-the-post norm, blame it also on nearly all political parties’ collective resistance to the electoral reforms that the election commission is trying hard to introduce. That would have given a level-playing field to citizen-centric initiatives like Jaiprakash Narayan’s Loksatta Party (in its debut, none of its candidates won though they garnered respectable vote shares) or Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (little is expected from it in Delhi assembly elections later this year).

In the current version of the game, such parties, put together by concerned and active middle-class citizens, cannot compete with the big players who have far more money power.

The Karnataka results might be a morale booster for the Congress, however short-lived, but there is little cheer in it for democracy.