Universal Suffrage, Inequalities, Welfare, and the ‘Gendered Voter’ in India: 1917 to the Present

Universal franchise is integral to citizenship’s promise of equality. Since they introduced the principle of collective bargaining, historically, political rights were handed down ‘cautiously,’ denying political personhood to large sections of people. The struggle for universal suffrage in India can be traced to the claims of the colonised to equality and self-determination. The adoption of universal franchise by the Constituent Assembly of India in November 1949, established political equality in a single moment of rupture. Yet, the insertion of voters in the electoral roll as individuals was difficult in a context where both access and intelligibility presented bureaucratic and political challenges. The persistence of deference in a caste-based society bound the vote to traditional systems of authority. With popular mobilisations in the late 1980s the ‘voter’ finally emerged as a significant political category. The potential of universal suffrage to attenuate the inequalities of social class has shown two tendencies—of reinforcement, where the ‘excluded’ have ushered in a different politics through the power of ‘irruption’ in the electoral domain, and of enervation—where the power to change is enfeebled by turning the working class into ‘beneficiaries’ binding them in a relationship of indebtedness to the state.