Q1.
In 1947, our literacy rate was about 14 per cent, only about 8 per cent among women. Some argued that the right to vote should be given only to literate people. Discuss in your group why the Constitution makers may have decided on universal franchise from the time of Independence itself.
Answer
Because a literacy test would have handed the new republic straight back to the small class that colonial rule had already privileged — and would have left about 86 out of every 100 Indians, and 92 out of every 100 women, with no voice at all. The Constitution makers had lived through exactly that: before Independence around 13 per cent of Indians were allowed to vote, and franchise was not universal. Universal franchise was a deliberate break with that.
The reasons they may have weighed, in order of force:
- Low literacy was a result of colonial rule, not a fault of the people. Punishing Indians for a deprivation the colonial state had produced would have been doubly unjust.
- Being unlettered is not the same as being unable to judge. A farmer knows whether the canal was repaired, whether the ration reached the village, whether the school has a teacher. That knowledge is what a vote records.
- The people most in need of representation would have been excluded. The poor, women, and the communities kept out of schooling for generations are precisely those whose problems most need a hearing in a legislature.
- A test can always be stretched. Once you accept literacy as a filter, someone can add property, or income, or education, and the electorate shrinks and shrinks. A clear, universal rule closes that door.
- Legitimacy. A government elected by one-seventh of the adults could not credibly claim to speak for the nation, and India needed the new Constitution to be accepted by everyone.
- Trust as a founding decision. Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, quoted at the head of the chapter, described it as adopting adult franchise “with an abundant faith in the common man and the ultimate success of democratic rule”.
Why the experiment worked: the system was designed around the voter as she was, not as some ideal. Candidates were given symbols, so a voter who could not read a name could still identify a party; the ballot was secret; polling officers were there to guide. Rights were extended first, and the machinery was built to make them usable — not the other way round.
Did you know? India also gave women the vote from the very beginning, when many older democracies had not. Women in Switzerland got the right to vote only in 1971 — more than twenty years after Indian women were already voting.