JOIN USConstitution and the right to vote
Contrary to popular belief, the US presidential election does not happen only on one day -- the first Tuesday of November (November 3 this year). Early voting has already begun and foreign observers of US elections have been somewhat surprised by reports of long queues (11 hours-long in one case!) in what’s supposed to be one of the world’s most mature democracies. More so, when the right to vote is guaranteed under the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Part of the problem is that in the US, the conduct of elections is in the hands of each of the 50 states. It has no equivalent of the Election Commission of India. Each state comes up with its own rules on how one must vote and the differences between the states are large. This has not always resulted in neutral voting laws. In the southern states, African Americans were barred from voting through “literacy tests,” and these states continue to do so through myriad laws (including prohibiting anyone convicted of an offence from voting). Despite enshrining the right to vote in the Constitution itself, the US has had a long and shameful history of targeted voter suppression aimed at disenfranchising minorities and the poor.
The Indian Constitution, on other hand, does not mention the right to vote at all! For a country that calls itself democratic, it must come as a surprise to know that there is no constitutional right to vote, let alone it being a fundamental right. Instead, what the Constitution provides is a right to be enrolled in an electoral roll for the purposes of a general election (Article 326), and that this right is to be extended to all adults of sound mind irrespective of gender, religion, caste, etc (Article 325).
In fairness, this was a revolutionary move for its time. The Indian Constitution was one of the first to grant universal suffrage right from the start without discriminating against any citizen on the basis of landholding, literacy, race, religion, caste, gender, etc. Yet, it does not say something that the US Constitution did nearly 160 years ago -- that everyone shall have the right to vote.
It seems to have been understood in the Constituent Assembly though that the right to vote was guaranteed and enshrined in the Constitution through Articles 325 and 326 and there was no serious demand to make it a fundamental right. On the other hand, there were members (such as HV Kamath and Das Bhargava) who were against universal adult franchise and wanted the right to vote to be limited to those who were literate, etc. There were also worries expressed by many members (such as Deshbandhu Gupta) that thanks to Partition and the movement of refugees, the population numbers might be skewed in certain parts of the country.
Even as this was being debated, something quite remarkable was taking place outside the halls of the Constituent Assembly. The very first electoral rolls for the very first elections in independent India were being prepared. How they were prepared is discussed in a remarkable book by Israeli scholar Ornit Shani called How India Became Democratic, but what is quite noticeable is that even before the Constitution was finalised, before the provision was made for universal suffrage, efforts had already been made to ensure it was a reality even by the time of the first election.
This effort was not led by the Election Commission (which did not yet exist) nor by any political party or civil society. Rather, it was the bureaucracy, both at the central level and provincial level, and also in the larger princely states, which took an active role in ensuring that every last Indian adult would find a place on the electoral rolls. This monumental effort was almost forgotten in India till Shani’s recent book and is worth reading about.
Guaranteeing the right to vote is therefore not so much about putting the right words in the right part of the Constitution. It is about the political will to ensure and uphold the principle of universal suffrage, backed up by independent institutions which make it happen. Even as it fought a brutal civil war to ensure equal citizenship for African Americans and included the right to vote in the Constitution, the US lost the political will to enforce it and did not put in place until much later the institutions and laws to implement it.