Universal franchise

Universal franchise — every adult citizen's right to vote, regardless of property, education, caste, sex or religion — counts among the Constitution's genuine achievements, and it is no small achievement at all. This is especially true given how widely it was believed that India's traditional social hierarchies were deeply entrenched and nearly impossible to eliminate, and given that even stable, long-established Western democracies had only recently extended the vote to women and to the working class. The idea has much older roots in Indian nationalism than the Constitution itself. Once the very idea of an Indian nation took hold among the political elite, the idea of democratic self-government followed naturally from it — Indian nationalism, almost from the start, conceived of a political order grounded in the will of every single member of society, not just a propertied or educated few. As a result, the idea of universal franchise sat securely at the heart of Indian nationalism from very early on. Even the very first non-official attempt at drafting a constitution for India — the Constitution of India Bill of 1895 — declared that every citizen, meaning anyone born in India, had a right to take part in the affairs of the country and be admitted to public office. Decades later, the Motilal Nehru Report of 1928 reaffirmed the same conception of citizenship, explicitly stating that every person of either sex who had attained the age of twenty-one was entitled to vote for the House of Representatives (Parliament). During the Constituent Assembly's own debates, as Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar put it on 23 November 1949, the Assembly adopted adult …