Q.Why is universal adult franchise compared to an elephant? Unmanageable, or like blind-men-describing-elephant story?

The elephant image works better as a caution about partial views than as a claim that voting is unmanageable. …

The cartoon compares "adult vote" to an elephant — a deliberately outsized, hard-to-fully-grasp image. Two different readings are worth weighing, since the question itself poses them as alternatives.

Reading 1 — unmanageable. India's universal adult franchise is genuinely enormous in scale: hundreds of millions of eligible voters, spread across every kind of terrain and community in one of the most socially diverse countries in the world, with voters differing enormously in literacy and access to information. On a surface reading, "elephant" evokes exactly this — something so large it is hard to control.

Reading 2 — the blind-men-and-the-elephant parable. In the old story, several blind men each touch a different part of an elephant (trunk, leg, ear) and each confidently describes the whole animal based only on that one part, arriving at completely different, partial, and ultimately wrong conclusions. Applied to universal franchise, this captures something more precise: many observers — at the time the Constitution was framed, and often since — have judged whether India's massive, largely poor and then-largely-illiterate electorate could sustain democratic voting based on only one narrow angle (education levels, or poverty, or scale alone), and drawn sweeping, often mistaken conclusions from that single partial view. …