“Maximum inclusion, minimum exclusion”: Adult suffrage and enfranchisement at a crossroads in India at 79

The people exist as a narrative, a collection of stories, rather than a fixed voting bloc.

— Pierre Rosanvallon, Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity

TODAY, INDIA COMMEMORATES 79 years of a transfer of power that, at least on paper, formalised a sense of ‘political equality’, even as “social equality” as Dr Ambedkar imagined, was yet too far aspirational. When the Constitution’s drafters took the extraordinarily bold step of establishing a model of “instant universal suffrage”, through Article 326 of the Constitution, thus giving the right to vote to all adult citizens, India became the world’s first large democracy to adopt universal adult suffrage from its very inception.

While globally suffrage has pushed to become more universalised, with the restrictions of property, religion or sex being lifted through a global diffusion of democratic ideal, the struggle for suffrage has not truly ended, for who can form a part of the demos has remained a crucial question. The battle is now being fought along different frontlines. As Schmidd, Piccoli and Arrighi note, “While significantly less contentious than in the past and affecting smaller segments of the population, it reveals the same tension between the democratic promise of equality and a reality of pervasive differentiation.”

In India too, like elsewhere, the issue of suffrage has transmogrified into the larger issue of enfranchisement. For instance, central to the question of adult franchise in India’s liberal democracy have been questions that were central to citizenship, such as ‘Who is an Indian?’ and ‘Where is India?’ - questions the Constituent Assembly Secretariat, a post-independence body that oversaw the preparation of India’s first draft electoral roll based on universal suffrage, had to confront. 

In How India Became Democratic (2017), academic Ornit Shani notes, in fact, that through narratives and storytelling around universal suffrage, inclusion of one’s name on the voter list was no more a mere procedural happening -