Q.They say elections are carnival of democracy. But this cartoon depicts chaos instead. Is this true always? Is it good for democracy?

Elections and democracy are connected, but they are not the same thing — and each fact matters for a different reason.

Why do modern democracies need elections at all? In principle, the purest form of democracy is direct democracy, where citizens themselves make decisions rather than choosing someone to decide for them — ancient Greek city-states worked this way, and India's Gram Sabhas come closest to it today. But direct democracy simply cannot scale to a country of lakhs or crores of people: nobody can gather everyone together to decide every policy. So in any large democracy, citizens instead choose representatives to govern on their behalf, and elections are the mechanism by which that choice is made — this is indirect, or representative, democracy. Because citizens' influence over government now runs entirely through their chosen representatives, the fairness of the method used to choose those representatives becomes critical to whether democracy is real or only nominal.

Does holding elections automatically mean a country is democratic? No — and this is the trap to watch for. Plenty of non-democratic governments hold elections deliberately, precisely to look democratic while designing the contest so it poses no genuine threat to their rule: a token opposition, no real alternative, or a count that isn't honest. What separates a democratic election from this kind of managed spectacle is that it must be both free (citizens can genuinely choose without fear or coercion) and fair (the counting and the rules aren't rigged in the rulers' favour). So: democracy generally requires elections, but elections by themselves don't prove democracy exists.