Devising the Instructions: An Exercise in Guided Democratic Imagination

It was somewhat by chance, and indeed unplanned, that the Constituent Assembly Secretariat undertook the colossal project of the preparation of the draft electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise in late September 1947. The practical implications of preparing the roll first arose in a detailed letter on the subject of ‘Electoral Rolls and Census’, which K. T. Shah, a member of the Fundamental Rights Committee of the Constituent Assembly, addressed to its President Rajendra Prasad on 27 August 1947. ‘It has been decided’, wrote Shah, ‘that the elections to the Legislature under the new Constitution shall be by Adult Suffrage. The preparation of the Electoral Roll on this basis, in every Unit, as well as for the whole country, will be a prolonged and costly task. I, therefore, suggest that the occasion may be utilised to take a complete Census of the country about the same time.’Footnote ¹⁰ Shah stressed that there was a lack of statistics to underpin the work of the National Planning Committee that the Congress set up in 1938 and of which he was a member. The idea, Shah explained, would be to hold the decennial census two years earlier than originally planned.

Shah wrote that he did not know exactly to what Ministry he should address his suggestion. He explained that:

Prasad forwarded the letter for the Secretariat’s consideration.

In late September 1947 the members of the Secretariat reviewed Shah’s proposal.Footnote ¹² In the notes of the discussions Shah’s proposition to combine the preparation of the electoral roll with the census was viewed with scepticism. Someone remarked that merging the two exercises would risk bringing politics into the census, creating confusion for the public and thus affecting the accuracy of the two operations.Footnote ¹³ Before making a final decision they sought an expert opinion on Shah’s proposal from K. B. Madhava, Professor of Mathematical Economics and Statistics at Mysore University.Footnote ¹⁴

In his report Madhava advised not to combine the preparation of electoral rolls with the census. He explained that an electoral roll is a statutory document, while a census is a ‘useful inventory’, and the implications of the two tasks are very different. The former is done on the basis of particular qualifications for enfranchisement and requires a complete enumeration, while the latter covers demographic, sociological, and economic characteristics and can be done on the basis of sampling.Footnote ¹⁵ Madhava also mentioned that ‘there has been much suspect [sic]’ over the decennial censuses of 1921, 1931, and 1941.Footnote ¹⁶ He wrote that separate and adequate steps are due to be taken for repairing the lack of statistics for policy making, but that the importance of ‘the maintenance of an accurate and up-to-date electoral roll’ makes it ‘worth while to concentrate attention’ on it alone.Footnote ¹⁷

Madhava wrote about the scope of the electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise, and the challenges that may arise in its preparation. He anticipated that ‘Proofs of having attained “adult” age will turn out to be an insuperable problem since ignorance of precise age is almost universal in India’, that ‘citizenship and naturalization are also bound to throw up good many problems of interpretations’, as would the ‘case of migrant people’.Footnote ¹⁸ He also discussed the need to consider the particulars that should be in the voters’ register, the drafting of suitable forms and instructions for filling them, and the process of districting.

Discussing Madhava’s report, the Under Secretary of the CAS concluded that ‘we should initiate the preparations of Electoral rolls as a separate operation and address the Provincial Governments in the matter’.Footnote ¹⁹ Subsequently, the Secretary of the CAS wrote to Rajendra Prasad with the recommendation not to mix up the preparation of electoral rolls with the census. He suggested that ‘it is necessary that we should take steps to consult Provincial Governments about the ways and means of preparing electoral registers on the basis of adult franchise’. He noted that ‘this is not an easy problem’.Footnote ²⁰ Prasad agreed.

In its preliminary steps toward implementing the universal franchise the CAS recognised that preparing the electoral roll would require a new form of population counting and knowledge that would make a clean break from colonial practices of enumeration. The Secretary of the CAS emphasised that ‘the last census was regarded as inaccurate on account of political and communal considerations having been allowed to come into play, and this criticism may become validated’ if the census is combined with the registration of voters, ‘in which, apart from individual interests, party interests may also be in action’.Footnote ²¹ In the view of the members of the Secretariat it was critical for the state to find a new way of seeing, to borrow James Scott’s construction.Footnote ²² Their logic was informed by a new imperative of seeing like a people. Divorcing the preparation of the electoral rolls from the census operation meant designing for the enumeration and constitution of the people as citizens-sovereigns, not people as a population, subjects-targets of democratic governance.Footnote ²³

In November 1947 the Secretary of the CAS wrote to all the premiers of the provinces and states and the convenors of group states:

In effect, this was an all-India administrative exercise in guided democratic political imagination. The CAS asked the premiers of provinces and states to imagine the making of a joint electoral roll. That meant they were asked to envision the whole adult population as capable equal voters, each carrying the same weight. They were asked to ‘undertake this in consultation’;Footnote ²⁵ to envisage the difficulties, as well as to identify the possible solutions. The idea was, the letter stated, that ‘after the views of the various Provincial and State governments have been received … to evolve some uniform method for preparing the electoral rolls and also to enable a general exchange of ideas on the subject’.Footnote ²⁶ The question before the premiers of provinces and states was how to operationalise the basic procedural aspect of the notion of equality. To address it they now had to engage concretely with making universal franchise in their local context.

Over the next few months the governments of the provinces and the states gradually took on the task. Some did so more conscientiously than others. The Jaipur Government, for example, appointed a committee to produce a report on the question of the ‘administrative problems involved in preparing the electoral rolls on the basis of adult franchise’.Footnote ²⁷ The Government of the United Provinces expanded the guided exercise in democratic political imagination, when it sent a detailed request to all District Officers asking for their views and proposals for the preparation of the roll. The letter laid out for the District Officers the differences between the nature of enrolment and franchise as it had been practised thus far, and enrolment on the basis of universal franchise, which they were asked to imagine. The letter stated, for example: ‘the number of persons on the … rolls will increase four times approximately [it actually increased 6.5 times], but the simplified qualification will to some extent at least make easier the preparation [sic]. There will be no need to refer to … income tax, or revenue records, to judge a person’s eligibility for being a voter nor will the roll for an area be prepared according to communities’.Footnote ²⁸

The Government of Madras considered some principle questions, for example, whether the onus of registering voters should rest on the voter or on the government. In doing so their note compared procedures for voters’ registration in Ceylon, England and the USA. They also proposed, among other things, to set a date, which would be declared as a public holiday, on which a census of all adult voters would be taken throughout the province; to prepare fortnightly reports on the progress of the work; and to ensure sufficient publicity through the press and ‘through propaganda vans’.Footnote ²⁹

The vast majority of the states and provinces that responded did ‘not anticipate serious difficulties in the task stupendous as it is’.Footnote ³⁰ ‘So far as Patna State is concerned’, wrote its Chief Minister, ‘the work of the preparation of electoral rolls on the basis of adult franchise … can be tackled with a tolerable degree of accuracy through the … net-work [sic] of which the Patna government have got [sic] throughout the State’.Footnote ³¹ Similarly, Surguja State’s letter laid out in detail their ‘network of staff’ that could ‘prepare a list of all adults’.Footnote ³² Notably, Surguja, as in most princely states, had no experience with any form of democracy until that time, unlike the provinces of British India, where elections on a limited franchise were held. Some governments suggested that ‘by the introduction of adult franchise preparation of electoral roll will be very much simplified’.Footnote ³³ Bureaucrats in the states and provinces were quick to identify the officers who would be entrusted with the task. They even had notions of how much they would be paid for the additional work;Footnote ³⁴ what the registration form should look like;Footnote ³⁵ and who in, or which part of, the local administration would supply the forms.Footnote ³⁶ Only in one state, Bhuj (Kutch) did the Dewan write that ‘educationally and politically Kutch is a backward state … conditions are such as to make it very difficult in the immediate future to introduce adult franchise and to prepare electoral rolls based on such franchise’. Footnote ³⁷ Some state governments suggested that the Indian Government should arrange for training courses for Election Officers to remedy lack of qualified personnel in this matter.Footnote ³⁸

It was perhaps because the request to ‘imagine the roll’ was not pinned to a grand nationalist dream about freedom and democracy, but was rather confined to the concrete technical venture of enlistment, that administrators of the states and provinces could envisage the fine details the process would entail in their local contexts. In the CAS’s request of the provinces and states the idea of the universal franchise was not accorded with special moral weight or importance. The CAS asked them to ‘start examining the administrative problems involved’Footnote ³⁹ in preparing a list of all adults, as well as the difficulties that may arise in doing so. Their task was not to implement freedom, equality or the so-called ‘will of the people’. The task was posited as ambitious and complex, but it was ultimately perceived to be a technical and administrative undertaking.

Indeed, the correspondences from administrators in the provinces and states demonstrated their pragmatic approach and problem-solving orientation to making universal franchise work. Administrators delved into the minutiae of the task. They described in detail and thus introduced before the CAS the local administrative structure and its capacities, as well as recent relevant legislation. The political, historical, or even symbolic significance of the universal franchise was completely absent from the correspondences. Accordingly, administrators made efforts to ‘measure’ the endeavour of the making of the universal franchise, breaking down the task into numbers.

Thus, the imagined difficulties were mostly logistical. A frequently expressed concern was an anticipated shortfall of paper for the roll and presses for printing because, for example, as the Election Commissioner East Punjab commented, ‘all the big presses at which they [the rolls] used to be printed are in Lahore’, which was now in Pakistan.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Madras and Jaipur governments predicted a shortage of paper on the basis of estimated projections of their voter population under the adult franchise.Footnote ⁴¹ The Jaipur Government calculated that 1,000 reams of paper would be needed, and that ‘it may even be necessary to sponsor some legislation for commandeering private presses for the purpose’.Footnote ⁴² Another envisaged problem was the difficulty of determining the age of voters because of the general absence of birth records and certificates.Footnote ⁴³ A few states also mentioned the difficult topographical conditions and the lack of means of communication as factors that might impede the work.Footnote ⁴⁴

In some of the states, for example, Cochin, Manipur, Mewar, Pudukkottai, and Travancore, adult franchise was already introduced at that time, or in the process of being introduced. These states, therefore, did not anticipate any special difficulty for preparing the electoral rolls.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Government of Travancore was just preparing at the time for its first elections on the basis of adult franchise for an electorate of 2.95 million, which was to take place in early February 1948. The Secretary to the Government of Travancore shared with the CAS in great detail, over a six-page letter, the scheme that they had devised for the task, describing both the legal and administrative actions: how the enlisting of all adults was actually done; which personnel were in charge and how they were remunerated; what difficulties they encountered; what steps were taken to ensure as far as possible the accuracy of the work; and the methods for engaging the public in the process. Thus, they decided to conduct the registration ‘on a house-to-house basis … because it was thought that a voluntary or optional system of registration would hardly serve to achieve the desired object. For ensuring the collection of all relevant statistics relating to the adults of the State, a form (copy enclosed) was adopted for the registration of adults.’Footnote ⁴⁶ The affixing of numbers to homes was part of the operation.Footnote ⁴⁷ The letter of the Government of Travancore expanded on the ways local bureaucrats were managed so as to prevent disenfranchisement. For example, for each registration unit two assessors of different communities were appointed in order to avoid communal bias.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Secretariat of the Constituent Assembly reviewed all the responses. After receiving and considering replies from most of the provinces and states, an ‘analytical summary of the views expressed in their letters was prepared and placed for consideration’ by the members of the CAS.Footnote ⁴⁹ Ultimately, it was the Travancore plan for implementing adult suffrage that captured the political imagination of the CAS.

In a note to the Constitutional Adviser (CA), B. N. Rau, the Joint Secretary on 16 February 1948, asked that the ‘CA may see the letter from the Travancore State … containing the details of the steps taken by them for the registration of voters on the basis of adult franchise.’Footnote ⁵⁰ On that same day Rau wrote: ‘we must thank the Secretary of the Travancore Government for the full and detailed information given in the letter. I should then like [Under Secretary] to prepare a plan for India as a whole nation on the lines of the Travancore plan and bring up for discussion.’Footnote ⁵¹ Within a week this had been done. The Under Secretary added his own note: ‘a revised note is placed below. I have drafted it in the form of a memorandum which can be sent to the States and Provinces’.Footnote ⁵²

During the four months of administrative deliberations within the CAS, in the provinces and the states, the question of implementing universal adult franchise was rendered into imagining a joint roll of all adults in the land as equal capable voters. Designing for that electoral roll began laying the groundwork for scaling up both a national polity for India, as well as the notion of procedural equality for its people.

‘A Plan for India as a Whole Nation’

By 15 March 1948 the Joint Secretary of the CAS issued a circular letter to all provinces, states, and convenors of group states containing instructions for the preparation of the draft electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise, and detailed directives for the actual enumeration, requesting that the work be carried out forthwith.Footnote ⁵³ The rationale was that ‘it is clearly desirable that the elections for the future Central and Provincial Legislatures (these latter are referred to in the new constitution as State Legislatures) should be completed as early as possible after the new constitution comes into operation’.Footnote ⁵⁴

The instructions for the compilation of the roll were issued in anticipation of the new constitution. But they were pegged to the draft constitution that was under consideration and were legitimated on that basis. The letter, which ran over six pages, included an introduction, general instructions, and explanations on the nature of the franchise, the order for preparing the rolls, the types of electoral rolls, the form of the electoral roll, directives for the revisions of the rolls, as well as an appendix with the ‘provisions as to the disqualification of electors’, based on articles from the draft constitution. General instructions, the letter stated, ‘have been drawn up partly on the basis of the replies received from the various governments and partly on existing procedures in certain parts of India’.Footnote ⁵⁵

The instructions set out that every citizen, as defined in article 5 of the draft constitution, of or above 21 years of age who is not disqualified by reason of unsoundness of mind or of non-residence is entitled to registration on the electoral roll. A voter should have a place of residence in the electoral unit for a period of no less than 180 days in the year ending on 31 March 1948.Footnote ⁵⁶

While the qualifications for being a voter were uniform and were based on the draft constitution, the instructions for the preparation of the roll on the ground provided scope for adjustments and flexibility. The instruction letter stated that ‘there is no intention to standardise the procedure, but only to indicate the general lines on which the work should proceed. Local variations may be found to be necessary and appropriate modifications may accordingly be made by the Governments concerned.’Footnote ⁵⁷ The language of the roll was left to the discretion of each province and state, as was the method of ascertaining the age of a voter.Footnote ⁵⁸

At the same time, the elaborated description of the process of enumeration made it very concrete and easy to imagine: ‘the registration should be on a house-to-house basis, that is to say, an officer should be deputed to visit each house for the purpose of preparing the register. The registration work may proceed on the basis of the house numbers given in the 1941 census. New buildings in electoral unit may be given supplementary numbers.’Footnote ⁵⁹

The instructions contrasted the pursuit of universal franchise with the state of franchise until that time:

An illustrative Form of the Electoral Roll was attached in an appendix. These instructions and the new registration form essentially inverted the logic that underlay the colonial form of representation and principles of devolution.

Since the work was to be done in anticipation of the new constitution, the letter of instruction explained that for the present, until the constitution and an election law come into force, it would suffice if draft rolls were prepared under executive instructions, which each province and state should issue. Finally, the CAS requested a fortnightly report from all governments, giving details of the progress made and difficulties encountered.

The manner in which the instructions were formulated, in a collaborative consultation, as an exercise in guided democratic political imagination that went down to the smallest technical details, contributed to imbuing the notion and practical implications of universal franchise within the bureaucracy, which had been at the foundation of the colonial edifice. The almost four months of correspondences and consultations about the actual making of the universal franchise between the Secretariat and administrators across the country triggered a democratisation of the bureaucratic imagination. This did not mean that a new democratic bureaucracy simply emerged in India.Footnote ⁶¹ But this process produced a fundamentally new set of bureaucratic attitudes in relation to the notion and practice of procedural equality for voting. Moreover, devising the instructions for the preparation of electoral rolls on the basis of universal franchise fostered the sense of an administrative capacity for India as a whole nation, as bureaucrats embarked on making possible and practicable for India what was until then considered impossible.

The 15 March 1948 letter of instructions for the preparation of electoral rolls in anticipation of the new constitution constituted a common bureaucratic ground for democratisation on an all-India scale.Footnote ⁶² A day after the letter was issued B. N. Rau wrote a summary note on ‘preparation of electoral rolls under the new constitution’, which in effect set the instruction letter as a new bureaucratic precedent. Rau wrote in the margins of the note that this ‘may be useful, if questions are asked as to what action we have taken’.Footnote ⁶³

The 15 March 1948 letter, and Rau’s ‘useful’ note, turned the decisive moment of preparing a plan for the registration of voters on the basis of adult franchise ‘for India as a whole nation’ – a task that was in essence revolutionary – into a convention. Subsequent to the process of devising the instructions for the preparation of the electoral roll, the grand abstract notion of the universal franchise became a concrete practicable administrative assignment for bureaucrats. The notion of universal franchise fundamentally went against the grain of the colonial mind.Footnote ⁶⁴ At a stroke, designing the electoral roll for the registration of the entire adult population precipitated the emergence of new democratic dispositions within the bureaucracy and a rupture with its colonial past.

The issuing of executive instructions for the preparation of electoral rolls by the governments of the provinces and the states put into operation the making of the universal franchise, which officials at the local level were tasked with. Over the following months the CAS’s instructions were translated into the breadth of the country’s local contexts, and became more detailed and tangible. Provincial governments’ instructions often spread over half a dozen pages or more, and included appendixes that explained relevant draft constitutional articles and a sample Form of Electoral Roll. They included hypothetical case illustrations, for example, for determining domicile and citizenship of a voter. Most governments sent more than one set of instructions. The first was followed up by clarifications in response to queries from district officers or comments from the CAS. The instructions sent to local level administrators were both in English and the vernacular.

The local instructions often contained a general background statement about the assignment. The Government of the Central Provinces and Berar, for example, wrote to all Deputy Commissioners in the province that: ‘The draft Constitution of India is expected to be introduced in the Constituent Assembly in October next ... As the basis of electoral qualification under the future Constitution is likely to be adult suffrage, the work of preparation of the electoral rolls will be a colossal one. The Provincial Government, therefore, desire that the preparation of these rolls should be undertaken forthwith in the districts.’Footnote ⁶⁵ The Reforms Commissioner of Assam wrote with a seriousness of purpose:

One of the first tasks was house numbering, which was prescribed in the form of the electoral roll. Provincial governments adopted the instructions for house numbering suggested at the time by the Census Commissioner.Footnote ⁶⁷ Provincial governments elaborated and explained that house numbering in a village should start from the North-East and end in the South-East.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Reforms Commissioner of Assam suggested that: ‘Each house-holder is to be made personally responsible for preservation of the number affixed on the house.’Footnote ⁶⁹ The Government of West Bengal instructed that ‘Numbering should be done in a readily identifiable form’ and that this ‘may be done by etching on wood on the door-piece or on a substantial tree near the house, or by hanging a number-plate made of wood or bamboo or by painting, or in any locally devised form’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Provincial governments instructed that a senior official, like an assistant to the Deputy Commissioner or a ‘capable Deputy Collector’ should take charge of overseeing the preparation of the rolls and supervise closely the staff engaged in the work.Footnote ⁷¹ Moreover, the enumerators should be ‘local men of probity who know their area and who are generally respected there’.Footnote ⁷² The instructions specified the staff that should conduct registration of voters and the compilation of the rolls in the rural and urban areas. For example, in the Central Provinces and Berar it was the revenue staff in rural areas and the municipal staff in urban areas, and in East Punjab patwaris and registration muharrirs. Some of the executive instructions depicted the compilation of the roll itself: ‘once the period of registration of names has expired, all the patwaris shall assemble at their tehsil head quarters with the list of each village arranged alphabetically. At the tashsil headquarters the rolls will be compiled zailwise. Within each zail the villages should be arranged alphabetically’.Footnote ⁷³ In urban areas the registration officials were instructed to ‘go through every street systematically and make inquiries from house to house’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Central Provinces and Berar government clarified that ‘Where there are more than adult persons than one in a house the names of all such persons should come one after another and the entry pertaining to the succeeding house number should follow after all such names.’Footnote ⁷⁵

Governments’ instructions also described in detail how, for example, the names of voters should be arranged; what should be the unit for the preparation of the rolls – mainly village in rural areas and by ward in urban areas; and where and how essential stationery materials should be purchased. The West Bengal Government, for example, wrote that they requested of ‘the Deputy Controller, Stationery’, paper ‘at the rate of 5 sheets half-foolscap for every 10 voters’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Officials were asked to spell names of voters accurately, make sure the lists were legible and written neatly, in ink and on one side of paper. Moreover, governments’ instructions provided very detailed technical explanations for each item on the form of the electoral roll, and for how to work out the residential and citizenship qualifications for enrolment. They also set the language of the rolls, and gave directives for the compilations of fortnightly reports on the progress of the work.Footnote ⁷⁷

The method of ascertaining the age of a voter was left to the discretion of each province and state. This was one of the expected challenges that arose in the process of the devising of the instructions. Governments suggested, for example, that a ‘school certificate or a municipal certificate of birth or horoscope should be taken to be sufficient proof’,Footnote ⁷⁸ or checking birth registers at police stations and kotwar’s books.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Assam, one district officer suggested to ‘intelligently frame’ a questionnaire on historically important local and national events for each area, such as ‘the floods of 1927, the freedom movement of 1930’, and to ascertain the age qualification of voters by their ability to recall such events. The Reforms Commissioner of Assam’s view, however, was that this method could not be applied in all cases, though it may be ‘adopted to suit local conditions’. He suggested ‘to leave this point for the district officers to decide for themselves as to the best method to be adopted to meet the need of each area’.Footnote ⁸⁰ He anticipated, in particular, a difficulty in verifying the age of female voters. In case of doubt, and for the registration of ‘purdahnashin’ women he prescribed, on the basis of Rule 15 of Part I of the Assam Legislative Assembly Electoral Rules, 1936, a form for age certificate.Footnote ⁸¹

Provincial governments noted the importance of the cooperation of the public for the success of the work. They asked that registering officials inform people in the village or ward about their planned visit to register names in that area a few days beforehand, and to come at a time people are likely to be home. Thus, muharrirs in East Punjab were instructed ‘to make their house-to-house visits before 10 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. During the day between 12 noon and 4 p.m. muharrirs and supervisors should be required to meet … in order to exchange notes to avoid multiple entries of one name’.Footnote ⁸² An illustration was provided for that procedure: ‘Roshan lives in the Civil Station of Amritsar and also has a place of residence in Karmon Deorhi, which he may be using occasionally as his residence.’ His name is thus likely to be entered in both places. ‘When these muharrirs meet as suggested above and compare entries, they are bound to discover this.’Footnote ⁸³ The Government of West Bengal suggested that enumerators may ‘convene village or ward gathering, where the work can be explained and discussed, and data gathered for insertion in the Rolls’, and that this may be completed by visiting individual houses.Footnote ⁸⁴

Local governments instructed to ensure wide and local publicity to the work of the preparation of electoral rolls. They asked officials to do so through press communiqués in the vernacular, or by other means.Footnote ⁸⁵ For example, the East Punjab Government sent a copy of a press notice that announced the preparation of electoral rolls to the Director General of Public Relations ‘for its adaptation for other means of publicity, such as Cinematograph slides, Radio, etc.’.Footnote ⁸⁶ It was only with respect to the need to publicise the work that sometimes the plain administrative prose of the instructions was cut through by the sense of the gravity of the operations. ‘For the first time’, the Government of West Bengal stated, ‘and under conditions of full self-government adult franchise is being worked out in the country. It is essential that everyone should come to know of this valuable political right which each adult wields.’Footnote ⁸⁷

Local instructions sometimes deviated from the CAS’s guidelines, or were phrased in ways that were open to interpretation and potential breaches in the registration of all adults. Some governments made changes to the form that the CAS devised. For example, the Government of East Punjab added a column for occupation and omitted the column for house number and address. Some governments dwelled on colonial rules, for example, the age certificate form for women whose age was in doubt. Indeed, not every bureaucrat that was obstructionist in the 1930s suddenly turned into a non-obstructionist in 1947–1949. Once the registration started, distinct forms of exclusionary practices emerged among administrators on the ground. But, as the following chapters will show, the CAS and various citizen and social organisations took measures against such attempts on the basis of new parameters of governance, based on procedural equality, set by the universal franchise. The CAS unwearyingly oversaw local governments’ instruction and their work on the ground, and redressed the breaches that came to its attention.Footnote ⁸⁸

Once the actual registration of voters started in anticipation of the constitution, the making of democracy on the ground sometimes outpaced the deliberative process of constitution making. The motion on the preparation of the electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise came up for discussion before the Constituent Assembly for the first time only in January 1949, when much of the preliminary work was already well under way.Footnote ⁸⁹

The democratic shift that took place in the bureaucratic bent and imagination could be illustrated, by looking briefly at the different attitudes and practices that were devised by colonial administrators while addressing the challenge of enrolling women and other groups at the margins of society during the expansion of the franchise in the 1930s. In particular, the next section looks at problems associated with the enlistment of women, which arose both in 1935 and in 1948–1949, but that was dealt with completely differently.

Rewriting the Bureaucratic Colonial Imagination

In discussions on the expansion of the franchise in the early 1930s, provincial franchise committees regarded universal adult suffrage ‘to be impracticable at present’, in particular ‘for administrative reasons’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Colonial administrators’ lack of imagination, or rather pursuit of bureaucratic expediency, went so far as to suggest that ‘the size of the electorate should be determined by the number of polling officers available’.Footnote ⁹¹ There was an admission that

When colonial administrators were asked ahead of the enactment of the Government of India Act, 1935 to make the leap in the expansion of franchise for elections to the Provincial legislatures from an electorate of approximately seven million to just under 32 million, they still expressed scepticism in some of the provinces, and found the work envisioned by that expansion of the franchise impossible or impracticable. But unlike the idea of universal suffrage, this modest expansion was thought to be ‘generally administratively feasible’.Footnote ⁹³

More fundamentally, the concept of an electoral roll that would bind all adults together as equal individuals was anathema to colonial administrators. They designed voter lists and registration forms that divided the electorate into at least three types of constituencies: general, European and Mohammadan. It contained qualifications such as ‘Husband pays income tax, literacy’; and it included a ‘Special provision regarding names of women’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Indeed, the intention at the time to expand the franchise for women turned out to be a particularly difficult assignment for colonial bureaucrats.

The Government of India Bill, 1935 based on the White Paper and the Indian Franchise Committee envisioned, as part of the expansion of the franchise a growth of the female electorate. The Joint Parliamentary Select Committee was anxious that there should be a substantial increase in the number of women enfranchised.Footnote ⁹⁵ But some provincial governments and administrators were at odds with that task. Early in the discussions of the 1935 constitution, the Government of Bihar and Orissa, for example, attempted to reduce the size of the electorate, and to disenfranchise women. The government had qualifications dependent on taxation for the right of franchise. They argued for an increase in the ‘anna franchise’ (from 9 to 12 anna), and even demanded a rupee franchise.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Bihar and Orissa government threatened that otherwise there would be no guarantee that ‘elections will be carried out with success and without grave disorder’.Footnote ⁹⁷

Already in 1933 Sir John Kerr, the Deputy Chairman of the Indian Franchise Committee, observed that some provinces, in particular Punjab, Assam, Bihar, and Orissa, were ‘really after a reduction of the number of women votes’.Footnote ⁹⁸ He explained that the landed oligarchy in the Legislative Council, who strengthened its power since the reforms of 1920, ‘are now doing all they can to keep the franchise qualification for the tenant class as high as possible, and they are supported by the official element in the Government’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Government of Assam wrote that ‘they have already gone farther in extension of franchise [for women] than they really think is safe’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Moreover, various Reforms Officers in the provinces demanded to prescribe by local rules how ‘their’ women should be treated. The Government of Bihar and Orissa, for example, was of the view that ‘a woman’s name should be removed from the electoral roll if she is divorced, or if her husband dies or loses his property’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Indeed, a key criterion for franchise was property ownership. But when colonial administrators encountered a community where women generally held property they saw this as a pretext for an exception. Thus, at a conference of Reforms Officers in March 1935 in Delhi it was noted that ‘A difficulty arises in the Khasi Hills where the Matriarchal system prevails, property being in the name of women, who will therefore have to appear on the roll. But since they do not ordinarily exercise any public function they will require to nominate some person to exercise the vote.’Footnote ¹⁰²

Another issue was the question of application for enrolment in relation to women.Footnote ¹⁰³ After prolonged correspondences on the matter the Secretary of State ultimately agreed that in effect the provinces would make their own rules over women’s registration.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Thus, the governments of Bengal, and Bihar and Orissa did not prescribe application requirement for women. In the United Provinces and Central Provinces applications by women were required ‘in respect only of the qualification arising from (a) literacy (b) being the pensioned widow or mother of a soldier; or (c) being the wife of an ex-soldier or policeman’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Madras, Bombay and Assam governments required applications from women for all purposes. Governments of the provinces recognised that the application requirement would have the effect of reducing the number of women enfranchised.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The actual enrolment of women became a particularly contested matter. Officials in some provinces suggested that ‘the recording of women’s names present peculiar difficulties’, and ‘is in any case a matter of difficulty and delicacy and every care must be taken to avoid causing offence’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The problem was that women refused to be registered under their own names. It was ultimately agreed that ‘if a difficulty is experienced in finding out the names to be entered, there is no objection to entering a woman as the wife of “A B C”’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ rather than being a free enfranchised individual. An illustrative form for such a case was attached to the letters for the District Officers.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Eventually, electoral rules for the preparation of electoral rolls in the provinces included particular provisions regarding the registration of women, such as: ‘Where for social or religious reasons there is an objection to the entry of the actual name of a woman in any electoral roll such women may be entered in the roll as “the wife of A. B. (husband’s name)” or, if she is unmarried, as “the daughter of A. B. (father’s name)”.’Footnote ¹¹⁰

Having to address the issue of women’s franchise the colonial Government of India insisted that the matter of increasing the number of women on the register was ‘intimately connected with the administrative feasibility of registering and polling larger numbers’.Footnote ¹¹¹ But it really chose to shirk responsibility for that problem. The Government of India wrote to the Secretary of State for India: ‘At the same time of second election this matter will concern responsible Provincial Governments not under your control. It would seem to be inappropriate now to determine finally what their administrative capacity will be, without giving them an opportunity of expressing their opinion.’Footnote ¹¹²

From September 1947 to March 1948, during the process of devising instructions for the preparation of the electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise, not a single difficulty, administrative or otherwise, was envisioned in relation to the enrolment of women.Footnote ¹¹³ In fact, no doubts were expressed about the practicability of adult franchise at that time. However, a few months after the work on the preparation of the draft electoral roll began in 1948, several District Officers, for example, in the United Provinces, reported that ‘difficulty is being experienced in ascertaining the names of lady voters who were unwilling to give out their names’, and that ‘they wish to be recorded as “wife of”, “daughter of”, “widow of”, etc. of a male member of their family’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Some District Officers did so. At this time, the United Provinces Government issued a letter to all District Officers to let them know that the difficulty with women electors was experienced in other districts. Contrary to earlier colonial practices, the Government made it clear that the practice of registering female voters as ‘wife of’ was not permissible, and that they were to be registered as individual voters. It directed them to start propaganda work to encourage women to register by their names, suggesting that in addition to giving wide publicity through the press, ‘platforms or beat of drums ... you may enlist women workers for the purpose’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The Government also issued a press communiqué declaring that after a very careful consideration it decided that names of female voters must be given in the draft electoral rolls. The press note encouraged the public to cooperate in giving names of women voters so as to avoid disenfranchisement. Addressing the people, the government explained:

In contrast, in the 1930s colonial administrators made calculated efforts to reduce the size of the electorate. Thus, in August 1935, the Joint Secretary to the Government of India, Reforms Office, wrote with concern to the Bihar and Orissa government that it came to his notice that ‘the number of persons entered on the rolls falls very considerably short of the numbers contemplated by the Indian Franchise Committee’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Bihar and Orissa government replied that, indeed, ‘the total number of actual electors shows a net decrease of 1,118,511; but then of course such a decrease was intentional, and the franchise was raised with the express purpose of producing a smaller electorate than the unmanageable one proposed by the Lothian Committee’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The Committee recommended the enfranchisement of 350,000 women. At first, the Bihar and Orissa Government estimated enrolment of only 54,976, and ultimately 232,140 women. The government explained that the lower numbers of enrolled women were ‘simply due to the fact that women do not wish to have their names enrolled ... In many cases the husbands refuse to have them enrolled even as “wife of”.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ In other provinces, too, the electorate was ultimately lower than anticipated.Footnote ¹²⁰

Moreover, colonial administrators avoided publicising their efforts, which certainly did not contribute to the successful expansion of the franchise. Several secret memorandums instructed Reforms and District Officers that until the bill was approved in Parliament and received Royal Assent, action had to be taken ‘as a matter of administrative routine and with the minimum of publicity for the preparation of a provisional roll’.Footnote ¹²¹ The Government of India was explicitly asked ‘to avoid any communiqué if possible and to deal with matters entirely informally’.Footnote ¹²²

In stark contrast, from 1948 onwards, publicity of the preparatory work of the electoral roll became a prominent principle and a common practice. Paradoxically, the CAS did so by drawing on the same bureaucratic colonial precedent, but with an inverted mind-set. The Joint Secretary of the Constituent Assembly wrote at the outset of the operation that ‘electoral rolls cannot be compiled without statutory authority. All that we can do now is to compile them in anticipation of such statutory authority, so that the draft rolls may be ready by the time the new Constitution and electoral law thereunder are passed.’Footnote ¹²³

The notion of conferring the right to vote and bringing women genuinely onto the electoral roll was beyond the purview of the bureaucratic colonial imagination. It was, also, consistent with the colonial government’s lack of faith in India’s illiterate masses and their negative attitudes towards enfranchisement of people at the margins of the then franchise, such as the poor and rural, illiterate people. Thus, when it came to considering electoral matters and franchise in ‘Backward Areas and Tribes’, some provincial governments, like Bihar and Orissa, suggested that the seats be filled by nomination rather than election ‘because [of] the danger of introducing the election ferment among the excitable population of the Khondmals’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Reform Commissioner to the Government of India remarked that ‘nomination should be resorted to only in the absence of any alternative. In the case of Khondmals, however, no alternative seemed to exist.’Footnote ¹²⁵

As another example, some provinces used coloured ballot boxes to enable rural illiterate people to vote. Each representative would be identified with a different colour. But in 1936 the United Province Government decided not to implement this. Instead, it devised a rule whereby local administrators, the presiding officer, or what they called, a ‘literate friend’, marked the ballot papers on behalf of illiterate voters. In response to an inquiry from the House of Commons in the matter, the United Province Government wrote that ‘many illiterate persons have little sense of colour, with the result that many voters might find themselves bewildered in polling booths and might record their vote for a candidate they do not wish to support’.Footnote ¹²⁶ It is noteworthy that during oral evidence before the Indian Delimitation Committee in 1935 some members of the Scheduled Castes stated that they ‘preferred the coloured box system to a system of marked voting paper, since under the other method everybody would know that the scheduled caste voter had voted’.Footnote ¹²⁷

As the following chapters will show, it was in relation to the task of enfranchising those at the margins of society – the subalterns – that the implications of the preparation for the first draft electoral roll on the basis of universal franchise for cultivating democratic dispositions among administrators, and for the rewriting of the bureaucratic colonial imagination was most strikingly demonstrated.

Conclusion

As a first step in devising the instructions for the preparation of the electoral rolls on the basis of full adult franchise the CAS consciously sought to break with colonial practices of enumeration. The correspondences and consultations about an action plan for preparing an electoral roll brought administrators around the country on board in the making of the universal franchise, and created a stake for them in the process. The universality of the franchise was not subject to question. It was posited as a premise. In the all-India exercise in guided democratic imagination administrators were not asked to submit their opinion on the merits or practicality of the idea of the rule of the people. They were asked to establish the institutional infrastructure in support of the notion that sovereignty resides with the people. That collaborative exercise in pursuit of creating a register of people that were bound together as equal citizens for the purpose of authorising their government also rendered existent the idea of ‘the people’.

The bureaucrats who were asked to plan for and manage that new all-India project took part in setting a foundational bureaucratic precedent. It was new in a real sense: neither British bureaucrats, nor any other administration before them, had prepared for the enrolment of such a large electorate. The process of devising the instructions for the electoral roll produced a new form of population knowledge: the enumeration of all adults who have the right to vote. They were the sovereigns of the new state. Metaphorically, this list would represent the recipients of the ‘transfer of power’.

In essence, the instructions provided a template for shaping democratic relations between the new Indian state, its bureaucrats at different levels, and the people. The plan to register voters on the basis of a house-to-house, village-by-village coverage would offer the opportunity for mid to lower level officials and ordinary people to engage with each other and with democratic institution building. This procedure for implementing the universal franchise created occasions for people to ‘meet’, ‘see’ and ‘speak’ with the state through the official representatives who showed up at their door to ensure their right to vote. And the plan for enrolment broke with prior colonial practices of counting, like the census. Roll making was not meant to simply count people for a ‘useful inventory’. The people were also taken into account as the sovereigns of the new state.

In the process of devising the procedures for the preparation of the electoral roll, in anticipation of the constitution, the notion of procedural equality was bureaucratised. This experience gradually turned the notion of adult franchise for India’s masses into a convention.

Initially, the design for India’s democracy was still only on paper. It was not inevitable that the paper plan, as imaginative and bold as it was, would match the aspiration of making universal franchise in practice in the midst of the partition, at a moment when the basic question of ‘who is an Indian’ – the basic criterion for being a voter – was undecided and contested. The next chapter explores that first challenge to the making of the universal franchise.