All the great civilizations, and probably all human societies, have known that human beings are capable of imagining; India merely cultivated this art, or faculty, more boldly than most.Footnote 1
From November 1947 India embarked on the preparation of the first draft electoral roll on the basis of universal adult franchise. A handful of bureaucrats at the Secretariat of the Constituent Assembly initiated the undertaking. They did so in the midst of the partition of India and Pakistan that was tearing the territory and the people apart, and while 552 sovereign princely states had yet to be integrated into India. Turning all adult Indians into voters over the next two years against many odds, and before they became citizens with the commencement of the constitution, required an immense power of imagination. Doing so was India’s stark act of decolonisation. This was no legacy of colonial rule: Indians imagined the universal franchise for themselves, acted on this imaginary, and made it their political reality. By late 1949 India pushed through the frontiers of the world’s democratic imagination, and gave birth to its largest democracy. This book explores the greatest experiment in democratic human history.
India’s founding leaders were determined to create a democratic state when the country became independent in 1947. But becoming and remaining a democracy was by no means inevitable in the face of the mass killings and the displacement of millions of people unleashed by the subcontinent’s partition on 15 August 1947. Partition led to a mass displacement of an estimated 18 million people, and the killing of approximately one million people.Footnote 2 Moreover, creation of a democracy had to be achieved in the face of myriad social divisions, widespread poverty, and low literacy levels, factors that have long been thought by scholars of democracy to be at odds with the supposedly requisite conditions for successful democratic nationhood.
How, against the context of partition, did democracy capture the political imagination of the diverse peoples of India, eliciting from them both a sense of ‘Indianness’ and a commitment to democratic nationhood? And how, in this process, did Indian democracy come to be entrenched? It was through the implementation of the universal franchise, I suggest, that electoral democracy came to life in India.
The adoption of universal adult suffrage, which was agreed on at the beginning of the constitutional debates in April 1947, was a significant departure from colonial practice.Footnote 3 Electoral institutions existed before independence. But these institutions were largely a means of coopting ruling elites and strengthening the colonial state.Footnote 4 The legal structures for elections under colonial rule stipulated the right of an individual to be an elector, and the provisions for inclusion on the electoral rolls were made on that basis.Footnote 5 But the representation was based on ‘weightage’ and separate electorates, wherein seats were allotted along religious, community and professional lines, and on a very limited franchise.Footnote 6 Rather than defining voters exclusively as individuals, the law defined them as members of communities and groups.Footnote 7 Thus, not only did the experience and legacy of elections under colonialism offer restricted representation without democracy, the electoral practices, which informed patterns of political mobilisation, resulted in the deepening of sectarian nationalism and impeded unity.Footnote 8 British officials unfailingly argued that universal franchise was a bad fit for the people of India. The small and divided electorate was based mainly on property, as well as education and gender qualifications. Under the last colonial legal framework for India, the 1935 Government of India Act, suffrage was extended to a little more than 30 million people, about one-fifth of the adult population.Footnote 9
The national movement had been committed to universal adult suffrage since the Nehru Report of 1928. Anti-colonial mass nationalism after the First World War further strengthened that vision.Footnote 10 But there remained a large gap to bridge in turning this aspiration into a reality, both institutionally and in terms of the notions of belonging that electoral democracy based on universal franchise would require. Throughout the first half of the 1930s in the course of making inquiries ‘into the general problem of extending the franchise’Footnote 11 in the run-up to the 1935 Act, both colonial administrators and Indian representatives in the provincial legislatures across the country claimed that ‘assuming adult suffrage’ would be ‘impracticable at present’,Footnote 12 as well as ‘administratively unmanageable’.Footnote 13
The preparation of the electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise was a bold operation, wherein the newly born state set out to engage with all its adult citizens, ultimately expanding the electorate more than five fold to over 173 million people, 49 per cent of the country’s population. Putting adult suffrage into practice and planning for the enrolment of over 173 million people, about 85 per cent of whom had never voted for their political representatives in a legislative assembly and a vast majority of whom were poor and illiterate, was a staggering bureaucratic undertaking.
The first elections took place between 25 October 1951 and 21 February 1952. But the overwhelming and complex preparatory work for the elections, in particular the preparation of the first draft electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise, had begun in September 1947. Before that ‘stupendous’Footnote 14 administrative task was handed over in March 1950 to the first Chief Election Commissioner of India, it was designed and managed by a small, newly formed interim bureaucratic body of the state in the making: the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (hereafter CAS), under the close guidance of the Constitutional Adviser, B. N. Rau.Footnote 15
This book explores the making of the universal franchise in India between 1947 and 1950. It tells the story of the making of the Indian electorate through the preparation of the first draft electoral roll for the first elections under universal franchise. This work was done in anticipation of the Indian constitution. The book, therefore, focuses on the practical – rather than ideological – steps through which the nation and its democracy were built. In this process, during the extraordinary period of transition from colonial rule to independence, bureaucrats inserted the people (demos) into the administrative structure that would enable their state rule (kratia). This process of democratic state building transformed the meaning of social existence in India and became fundamental to the evolution of Indian democratic politics over the next decades.
In the process of making the universal franchise, people of modest means were a driving force in institutionalising democratic citizenship as they struggled for their voting rights and debated it with bureaucrats at various levels. I argue that in India the institutionalisation of electoral democracy preceded in significant ways the constitutional deliberative process, and that ordinary people had a significant role in establishing democracy in India at its inception. By the time the constitution came into force in January 1950, the abstract notion of the universal franchise and the principles and practices of electoral democracy were already grounded.
The first draft electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise was ready just before the enactment of the constitution. Indians became voters before they were citizens. This process produced engagement with shared democratic experiences that Indians became attached to and started to own. The institutionalisation of procedural equality for the purpose of authorising a government in as deeply a hierarchical and unequal society as India, ahead of the enactment of the constitution turned the idea of India’s democracy into a meaningful and credible story for its people.
There is an ambiguity about the use and meaning of the term democracy. It both designates and describes empirical institutional structures, as well as a set of ideals about the power of the people by the people, and the will of the people. While analytically distinct, in practice the institutional and normative components always coexist.Footnote 16 The thrust of this book lies in the structural makeup of democratic rule. It explores how Indian bureaucrats departed from colonial administrative habits and procedures of voter registration to make the universal franchise a reality. In some ways, they were taking their cue from pre-independence local Indian constitutional convictions about franchise such as the position of the Nehru Report, which stated that ‘[a]ny artificial restriction on the right to vote in a democratic constitution is an unwarranted restriction on democracy itself’ and that the colonial notion of ‘keeping the number of votes within reasonable bound’ for practical difficulty ‘howsoever great has to be faced’.Footnote 17 To do so, in the circumstances of independence, Indian bureaucrats used imaginative power with which they ultimately shaped their own democracy.
This book explains the relations between two key democratic state-building processes – constitutional and institutional – that took place against the backdrop of partition over the two and a half seam line years of India’s transition from dominionhood to becoming a republic. The first was the process of constitution making, during which the ideals of electoral democracy and the conceptions of the relations between the state and its would-be citizens evolved. ‘Who is an Indian?’ was a contested issue and a constitutional challenge at independence.
The second process, which took place on the ground, was the preparation from November 1947 of the preliminary electoral roll. The preparation of the roll dealt in the most concrete way with the question of ‘Who is an Indian?’, since a prospective voter had to be a citizen. The preparation of the preliminary roll for the first elections was principally based on the anticipatory citizenship provisions in the draft constitution. The enrolment throughout the country, in anticipation of the constitution engendered, in turn, struggles over citizenship. This process provided the opportunity for people and mid to lower level public officials to engage with democratic institution building and to contest the various exclusivist trends to be found at the margins of the Constituent Assembly debates. The quality of the engagement and the responses to these contestations, the suggestions and questions that arose in the process of making the roll, and the language that these interactions produced, democratised the political imagination. It was these contestations over membership in the nation through the pursuit of a ‘place on the roll’, I argue, that grounded the conceptions and principles of democratic citizenship that were produced in the process of constitution making from above. For some key articles these contestations and the experience of roll making even shaped the constitution from below. Moreover, as a consequence of the process of implementing a universal franchise and the consequent citizenship making, the government at the centre was able to assert legitimate authority relatively smoothly over the changing political and territorial landscape of the subcontinent, giving meaning to the new federal structure.
The preparation of a joint electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise in anticipation of the constitution played a key role in making the Indian union. It contributed to forging a sense of national unity and national feeling, turned the notion of people’s belonging to something tangible. They became the focus of the new state’s leap of faith, in which they now had a stake.
The Archive
The archival materials that form the bedrock of this study are from the record room of the Election Commission of India. In addition, the book draws on a host of primary materials I researched at the National Archives of India, and the manuscript room of the Nehru Memorial and Museum Library, both in New Delhi, and briefly at the Maharashtra State Archives in Mumbai. Moreover, I was also able to gain copies of reports, parts of reports and documents prepared, in the main, in the context of the work of committees of the Constituent Assembly that are not available in the Constituent Assembly Debates, or in the collection of Select Documents in the Framing of India’s Constitution.Footnote 18 In the UK I obtained supplementary materials from the India Office Collections (IOC) at the British Library, London, and from archival materials at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge.
The Election Commission of India Record Room was a true treasure trove. The materials on the preparation of the first electoral rolls on the basis of universal franchise that lay at the bottom of long shelves at the back of the cool basement of the building, held the tale of a staggering bureaucratic endeavour. The materials include 70 folders, containing more than 1,600 documents, among them correspondences between and among the Secretariat of the Constituent Assembly of India in Delhi, high-, mid-, and low-level public officials and with a wide range of civic organisations and people from across the country. Between September 2010, when I sought permission to inspect the files dealing with the planning and preparation of the electoral roll for the first elections, and September 2012, I consulted all these records at the Election Commission record room. Thereafter, the files were transferred to the National Archives of India, where archivists catalogued them for the first time. The files became available for review there from December 2012.
What impelled me to search the early records of the Election Commission was a question I had been asking of senior election management officials for some time, and for which I could not get a satisfactory answer. I asked repeatedly how the first list of voters on the basis of universal franchise was prepared. How, under the conditions prevailing in the country at the time, did they actually enrol millions of men and women? The official Report on the First General Elections in India includes just over two pages on the ‘preliminary steps taken by the Constituent Assembly’ for the preparation of the electoral rolls.Footnote 19 It states, with reference to the Constituent Assembly, that it was ‘decided that the work should be taken in hand immediately’, and that in November 1947, the Secretariat of the Constituent Assembly addressed the state governments on the matter, and notes some steps that were taken thereafter.Footnote 20 I could not find a record of such a decision by the Assembly in 1947, nor of the work of the Secretariat. It was clear to me that behind these two pages there lay a much bigger story.
Once I began reading the records, I found myself drawn into an overwhelming story. I read the records in daily instalments; my schedule set by the opening hours of the record room, or by the working hours of its keeper, Mr Mahto. He suggested that I read the files upstairs in the air-conditioned library of the Commission. But I insisted on immersing myself in the files’ home, quarrying through the solid dust that covered the files. Excavating my way through to the ‘bottom of India’s electoral democracy’, I could gradually piece together the core plot. But there were manifold stories within the main story. On each issue or question raised there were a series of opinion notes prepared by members of the CAS, who each, in their turn, wrote a note on the previous note. The string of notes started from the junior staff, who usually presented the subject matter, and ended with comments and revisions made by the Joint Secretary of the CAS, and sometimes the Constitutional Adviser. These notes unravelled the thinking process that underlay the steps the CAS took for the preparation of rolls. From time to time, a member of the CAS prepared a note that recapped the ‘story’ of the preparation of rolls as it developed until that point. At the end of the working day I was left in great anticipation for the next, eager to find out how the CAS had replied to this person or that official. What were their decisions on the matters they were grappling with? I was like Padma, from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, keen to know ‘what happened next’.Footnote 21
I began, I realised, to read the archive as a ‘serialised epic’: the epic of India’s democracy. In particular, as I encountered letters from ordinary people and read the notes of members of the Secretariat on these letters, I grew eager to know what ultimately happened. I also grew in my admiration and appreciation of the real heroes of the making of the universal franchise in India: the staff of the Secretariat, under the leadership of B. N. Rau.Footnote 22
There has been much theoretical discussion over the last few decades about politics and statecraft in the fashioning of archival knowledge, its structure, and control of what materials are preserved or ‘lost’, and the limits these impose on the discursive possibilities that the archive allows.Footnote 23 These, of course, caution against the excitement in the face of new archival discoveries. The story of the preparation of the rolls in this book also draws on a variety of other sources. Nonetheless, it has been truly impossible, as a reader of these records, not to be profoundly inspired by them. One striking omission in the archive of the preparation of the electoral rolls for the first elections, however, is that there was not a single letter from or to a woman.Footnote 24 It is also clear that some of the material is missing. I hope the following chapters will take the reader, as authentically as possible, with me along the archival trail.
Perspectives on Democracy and Modern Indian History
India’s democracy and its survival has been a subject of major research interest over the last two decades. Previously, scholars of comparative politics and political theory considered India’s democracy to be an anomaly from which there was little to learn.Footnote 25 Yet, India’s democracy has proved to be robust. A number of major challenges, which are currently being faced by other democracies – both old and new – such as the problem of managing democratic regimes in multicultural and multireligious societies, have already been debated and experimented with in India. Thus, comparativists and political theorists are no longer been able to ignore the contribution of the study of India to general democratic theory and practice.Footnote 26 As Sunil Khilnani pointed out, India represents ‘the largest exercise of democratic election in human history; an index of what is in fact the largest reservoir of democratic experience within a single state, a resource for intellectual reflection that remains still underused’.Footnote 27 Indeed, since the 1990s, scholars of South Asia have ‘highlighted the political and intellectual limitations of universalizing Western experiences of democratization by bringing to light the particular genealogies of postcolonial democracy in South Asia, many of which lie beyond the colonial state’.Footnote 28 This book about the institutionalisation of democracy in India aims to contribute to the study of democracy in three main ways.
First, scholars have in the main studied how Indian democracy survives, despite profound divisions, by exploring a range of constitutional, institutional, and policy safeguards and mechanisms, which enabled it to manage its religious, ethnic and deep social diversity.Footnote 29 These explanations account for the endurance of democracy and democratic citizenship in India. But they offer little insight into its seemingly rapid and deep institutionalisation under the difficult conditions of independence. This book offers a fresh perspective on the embedding of democracy in India at the birth of the nation-state.
Second, theorists of democracy have conventionally seen the establishment of India’s democracy as a product of elite decision-making and institutional design. In this view, popular democracy, and the constitution, were endowed from above by discerning nationalist leaders and intellectuals. The shared premise of many analyses stemming from this view is that ultimately democracy ‘irreversibly entered the Indian political imagination’.Footnote 30 The universal franchise, accordingly, was destined to happen. One political theorist suggests that universal franchise came about because ‘the idea of universal franchise lay securely within the heart of nationalism’ and that ‘once the idea of a nation took root ... the idea of democratic self government could not but have followed’.Footnote 31 Sumit Sarkar argued that there was a ‘decisive linkage between anticolonial mass nationalism and the coming of democracy’, yet recognised that the precise nature of the linkage has not been well explained.Footnote 32 Indeed, how was universal franchise, the bedrock of democracy, institutionalised? The practical process of establishing universal franchise, that is the enrolment of all adult would be citizens just after independence, and of embedding the habit of an electoral democracy among India’s gigantic electorate was an enormously challenging task and it was not obvious at all that India would succeed in doing so. Among the challenges that Indian administrators confronted were the registration of millions of displaced refugees that were moving across the still open borders and that their citizenship status was in question, and more generally, an electorate that was 85 per cent illiterate, many of whom had no clear place of residence, which was required for enrolment. Even if the idea of universal franchise was secured as a future constitutional provision, the question of it coming into effect – its practicability and administrative feasibility – was not preordained.
Third, many have viewed India’s democracy as an inheritance of the British Raj, an extension of its bureaucratic structures and legal framework, which the Government of India Act, 1935 had already established.Footnote 33 The fact that other British colonies, with similar colonial constitutional structures, did not evolve into robust democracies undermines this viewpoint. There is the example of Pakistan, which shares the same colonial legacy as India but which has a deeply troubled history of democratic practice despite its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, stating at the beginning of the constitutional debates that Pakistan would have a liberal citizenship regime.Footnote 34
In Pakistan the question of the nature of the franchise was the subject of controversy from the outset. The 1956 constitution (subsequent to a second Constituent Assembly, after the first was dissolved by executive powers) provided for direct elections on the basis of universal franchise, and the electoral law provided for an ambiguous structure of separate electorates for West Pakistan and a joint electorate for East Pakistan.Footnote 35 The then Prime Minister, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, excused and bemoaned the lingering delay in holding elections, suggesting that the ‘thorniest problem’ in preparing for the process has been ‘to relate the Moslem and non-Moslem portion of our population in the franchise’.Footnote 36 In the following four decades separate electorates were intermittently repealed and then reintroduced, mainly as an act of political expediency.Footnote 37 The altering nature of the franchise in Pakistan made it very difficult to compile electoral rolls. In Pakistan more than two decades passed before direct elections on the basis of universal franchise were held and electoral rolls were prepared in 1970.Footnote 38
This book seeks to explain the institutionalisation of a democratic political imaginary in India, rather than taking it for granted. By demonstrating the ways in which Indians took part in the process of democracy building it suggests that democracy was not simply gifted from above. In doing so, I aim to contribute to our understanding of ‘democratic deepening’ that theorists have only recently started to explore, which is conceptually distinct from the democratic transition literature.Footnote 39 Showing how Indians made their own democracy will also indicate significant transformations and departures from the colonial legal framework and structures.
This is the first historical study of the preparations of India’s first draft electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise. It will complement what is surprisingly a very limited scholarship on India’s first elections, and an absence of research on the preparatory work for the first elections during the transition years from dominionhood to the establishment of the republic.Footnote 40 As such it offers scholars of democratic theory an important case on which to draw. Moreover, as the first study of the interrelationship between the making of universal franchise and the evolution of democratic Indian citizenship, which brings to light an important and previously untold part of modern Indian history, this book also aims to contribute in three main ways to current debates and new research on modern Indian history.
The historian Sumit Sarkar, among others, called attention to a lack of historical research on the transition across the 1947 divide.Footnote 41 He also wrote that ‘the constituting of democratic structures amidst the turmoil of the late 1940s’ has not been addressed.Footnote 42 This book is part of what is now an emerging new body of work on that period.Footnote 43 Recent work on the Indian state, particularly as it was shaped during the transition from colonial rule to independence, tends to emphasise continuities.Footnote 44 While recognising important continuities, which such literature sheds light on, this book examines a key aspect of the rupture and discontinuity in the making of independent India, which was critical to its process of democratisation. In particular, it explores changes to the bureaucratic political imagination in the transition from colonial rule to independence, the actual creation of democratic citizenship, and the institutionalisation of electoral democracy that were enabled by the administrative undertaking of making the universal franchise.
Moreover, in the same way that theorists of the transition to democracy have focused for a long time on the role of elites in establishing and installing democratic institutions, scholars of India have often claimed that in India, social transformation and democratisation was not driven from within the society but through a state bureaucratic agency and a ‘passive revolution’.Footnote 45 This book demonstrates how, in the process of making the universal franchise, ordinary people were a driving force in the institutionalisation of democratic citizenship – and that bureaucrats were responsive and engaging with these people. It provides a lens into the interaction between political processes and democratic institution building from above and from below. Recently, some scholars argued that in India it is ordinary Indians and particularly the poor who guard democracy and ensure its survivability.Footnote 46 I reveal the origins of this trait in India.
Over the last decade a new and important literature on citizenship in India has emerged.Footnote 47 Some of these studies focus on the legal formal articulation of citizenship, its history, and the ways in which the citizenship articles and future legislations were marked by the partition and the movement of population it wrought.Footnote 48 Gopal Jayal also examines citizenship in India beyond it being a legal status, looking at group struggles and their negotiation of rights and identity claims in the legal, social, and political spheres. Her study of the predicament of citizenship in India emphasises the ways India’s democracy fell short of its constitutional promises, mainly to promote equality. Taylor Sherman studies the variety of ways Muslims of Hyderabad, who became particularly marginalised after partition, articulated and negotiated their belonging in the first decade of independence. Her examination of practices and performative aspects of citizenship, rather than its formal legal status, as these emerged in the local context of Hyderabad throw new light on the processes of Muslims’ abstraction into the ‘India-wide concept of the Muslim Minority’.Footnote 49 Other studies have begun to look into issues relating to citizenship and to governance more broadly during that period of transition from colonial rule to independence.Footnote 50
The struggles for citizenship that emerged in the context of the preparation of the electoral rolls on the basis of universal franchise turned the idea of democratic citizenship into a living practice prior to the constitution being passed. As we will see, individuals and various groups fought for a place on the roll. Becoming voters turned them into equal right-bearing citizens for the purpose of authorising their government. They attained a position, albeit a limited one, of being equal in the public domain, while they were also members of a highly hierarchical society. This powerful aspect in the institutionalisation of democratic citizenship in India at its inception became, I suggest, a key to democracy’s survival in the face of its enduring shortfalls and many unfulfilled constitutional promises.
While this book is not a study of India’s constitution, it offers a unique empirical lens into some of the ways in which people understood and reacted to the constitution in-the-making from below, and how they used the draft constitution in their struggles for membership in the nation. There is no social history of the making of India’s constitution.Footnote 51 Commonly, studies of the drafting of the constitution centre on the deliberations in the ‘ivory tower’ of the Constituent Assembly. The study of the preparation of the electoral rolls in anticipation of the constitution shifts the focus onto the ways these deliberations were received on the ground by both officials and the people. I will show, in turn, how their inputs contributed to the shaping of the constitution from below. India’s constitution, which is one of the longest in the world, has endured despite many predictions that it would not do so in the long run and that it would not succeed as a basis for a stable democracy. Indeed, India’s ability to sustain its new democratic constitution was doubted even by some of its own makers. One of them commented at the end of the constitutional debates that ‘this Constitution made as it is for regulating our daily life, would not prove suitable and would break down soon after being brought into operation’.Footnote 52 The study of the interrelationship between the preparation of the electoral rolls and constitution making offers a fresh perspective on its endurance.
How India Became Democratic
Chapter 1 analyses the process of designing the instructions for the electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise and examines its implications for fostering democratic dispositions among those individuals who made up and operated the administrative machinery around the country. I suggest that, in effect, this process became an all-India administrative exercise in guided democratic political imagination. The notion of universal suffrage came to be imbued within the administrative machinery around the country. The idea of equality for the purpose of voting was bureaucratised. By examining this process against colonial discourses on franchise and on preparation of electoral rolls, I explore key changes in the bureaucratic political imagination in the transition from colonial rule to independence that were enabled by the administrative undertaking of making the universal franchise.
Distinct forms of exclusionary practices on the ground in the preparation of the draft electoral roll, once the work started, generated struggles for citizenship. Chapter 2 examines how the anticipated constitutional citizenship provisions were acted upon in these struggles over membership of the new nation. I focus on the question of the registration of partition refugees as voters, an issue that was a constitutional challenge and that led to numerous contestations over citizenship in the early stages of the making of the electoral roll. In the context of these contestations, a wide range of organisations from across the country deliberated over and used the language of the draft constitution. They also made resolutions on its basis and even enacted some draft-constitutional provisions in order to establish their democratic citizenship and voting rights. As a result of this process, democratic dispositions began to develop among both state officials and the people, as they were mentored into the principles of electoral democracy, and the abstract language and forms of the democratic constitution in the making started to strike roots among the population at large.
Chapter 3 explores how the principle and institution of universal franchise attained meaning and entered the political imagination of Indians. It argues that it was the way in which the preparation of the first electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise became part of popular narratives that played an essential role in connecting people to a popular democratic political imagination. The Constituent Assembly Secretariat communicated its directives for the preparation of electoral rolls as a story through press notes, subsequently discussed in the press. People could insert themselves into this narrative as its protagonists. This process, in turn, gave rise to a collective passion for democracy, contributing to the democratisation of feelings and imagination.
From its inception, the preparation of the electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise was an all-India administrative operation. It took place while 552 princely states were being dismantled and integrated into the new Union, and as the immediate consequences of partition were still unfolding. Chapter 4 explores how in the process of the preparation of the roll, and in dealing with the resulting contestations over citizenship, the centre disciplined the new federal structure. The constitutional and administrative challenges of welding the federation and of forging a common idea of Indianness manifested in the process of the preparation of the electoral roll. Yet, it was in the face of these challenges, I argue, that the preparation of electoral rolls became a key mechanism of integration, and of making a democratic federal structure.
The preparation for the first elections was inextricably linked to the process of constitution making. Both elections and citizenship lie at the heart of the democratic edifice. The outcomes of the preparatory work for the first elections, particularly the enrolment of voters, created facts on the ground and constrained the extent to which the work that was done over two years, in anticipation of the new constitution, could simply be reversed. Moreover, the experimentation with the draft constitution in the context of the making of the universal franchise, as well as the contestations over a place on the electoral roll and its relationship to citizenship, informed the making of India’s constitution. Chapter 5 explores this shaping of the constitution from below.
Despite the Secretariat of the Constituent Assembly’s imperative to be inclusive, and its efforts to redress breaches in the enrolment process, various forms of disenfranchisement occurred. Moreover, the work of the preparation of the rolls was done in anticipation of the constitution. The Secretariat took some inclusionary actions, such as the registration of partition refugees as voters, that were pending on finalising their citizenship status. The citizenship articles were only adopted in August 1949, when the rolls were largely ready. There were other late constitutional decisions that had an effect on the rolls. Chapter 6 explores the limits of inclusion in the making of the universal franchise, and the consequences of settling some constitutional decisions on the electoral rolls.
Making the draft electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise in the context of the unfolding grim tragedy of partition, ultimately enrolling 49 per cent of India’s population, the vast majority of whom were poor and illiterate, in anticipation of the constitution, required a rich political imagination. The conclusion brings together and recapitulates how such a democratic political imaginary was made resonant as a result of the interrelationship between the preparation of the roll and citizenship and constitution making. The production of a gigantic registry of India’s would be citizenry, through a qualitative engagement of officials at all levels with the people throughout the country, made the universal franchise a political and social fact that contributed to the creation and survival of a democratic collective imaginary in the world’s largest democracy.
In More than Real, David Shulman shows that in the South Indian language Telugu of the fifteenth-century ‘one gets exactly what one imagines’, and that ‘what is real is real because it is imagined’.Footnote 53 The kernel of making real the universal franchise began, as the next chapter explores, in an exercise in political imagination.
