Representative image of voting.
Credit: iStock Photo
While the majority of the African-Americans in the United States of America were struggling for the right to vote, India went through a silent revolution of universal adult franchise on January 26 1950. On that day, India’s entire adult population, which was 82 per cent illiterate, was granted the right to enter the electoral rolls.
For the African-Americans who went through a long agitation and pitched street battles, it took another 15 years to enter the rolls in 1965. Hardly 30 years before India enfranchised all its women at one stroke, American suffragists had to suffer arrests, imprisonment, and humiliation before they won the right to vote in 1920. British suffragists, who went through a long agitation and faced similar humiliations, won their rights in 1928.
During the same time, in colonial India, there was never an agitation demanding the right to vote. It was B R Ambedkar who consistently raised the banner of universal adult franchise since 1919 and sought the right to vote for every Indian before the British government. A restricted right to vote was granted in 1932 by the British Lothian Franchise Committee with conditions linked to property and education. Only 13.4 per cent of the adult Indian population was enfranchised.
Ambedkar’s campaign for universal franchise was met with apprehensions during the making of the Constitution. Even after independence, and till the time the Constitution was adopted on November 26, 1949, there was no popular agitation seeking universal franchise. Ambedkar’s Constitution handed over the right to vote on a platter to Indians without a struggle, unlike the independence they achieved.
The Indian voters exercised their franchise 18 times since 1951 for the Lok Sabha and, on average, 17 elections for legislative assemblies in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. These elections apart, local body polls, especially to the panchayats, have held immense significance. The voters, while exercising their right to vote, continue to face difficulties linked to administrative shortcomings. Dalits, tribals, the weaker sections of society, and women have been at the receiving end. The country has navigated decades of elections marked by vote rigging and the capturing of polling stations. In the villages, upper caste women rarely came out to vote; women’s votes used to be polled by members of their families till photo identity-based electoral rolls were introduced. Dalits were invariably prevented from polling or reaching the polling stations, despite the Indian Penal Code having a separate list of offences related to elections.
The heat is on ECI
But never has India’s electorate been as threatened as it is now, with the distinct possibility of disenfranchisement. The Voter Adhikar Yatra, launched by the opposition parties in Bihar, came amid the backdrop of this threat. The yatra was also designed as a political campaign in the poll-bound state, but what it essentially aimed to address was this lurking fear – of losing the right to vote.
That the right can be diminished and that political disenfranchisement is a reality is a realisation that hits hard. This is no longer about innocuous clerical errors that lead to the deletion of names from the electoral rolls. This is about deliberate attempts at disenfranchisement that bring to the fore the urgency of ensuring the right to exist in the electoral rolls. Ambedkar’s one-person-one-vote-one-value equation appears to be resonating in the hinterlands of Bihar. The resistance targets the constitutional gate-keeper entrusted with the conduct of elections in the country, the Election Commission of India (ECI), and the dispensation of the day, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
After the right to vote became a reality, it was about putting the administrative and logistic systems in place to hold elections that are rooted to this basic, legal right. It is on the ECI to ensure accountability in the process, and at the centre of this exercise is the preparation of electoral rolls.
Beyond the political stakes and ramifications, the Voter Adhikar Yatra has also been an expression of mistrust in the constitutional bodies of the country. India cannot afford to place its democratic credentials and the fundamental idea of citizenship under this shadow of misgivings. The question is not about the trust deficit anymore – it is about ways to bridge the gap, about the urgency with which the trust needs to be restored.
India’s voters, for the first time, are being mobilised to secure the idea of enfranchisement. The pushback, in its present form, has provided a spark for what could be a new suffragist moment in the country.
(The writer is an associate professor at the O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat)
(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH)