The people exist as a narrative, a collection of stories, rather than a fixed voting bloc.— Pierre Rosanvallon, Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity.TODAY, INDIA COMMEMORATES 79 years of a transfer of power that, at least on paper, formalised a sense of ‘political equality’, even as “social equality” as Dr Ambedkar imagined, was yet too far aspirational. When the Constitution’s drafters took the extraordinarily bold step of establishing a model of “instant universal suffrage”, through Article 326 of the Constitution, thus giving the right to vote to all adult citizens, India became the world’s first large democracy to adopt universal adult suffrage from its very inception.While globally suffrage has pushed to become more universalised, with the restrictions of property, religion or sex being lifted through a global diffusion of democratic ideal, the struggle for suffrage has not truly ended, for who can form a part of the demos has remained a crucial question. The battle is now being fought along different frontlines. As Schmidd, Piccoli and Arrighi note, “While significantly less contentious than in the past and affecting smaller segments of the population, it reveals the same tension between the democratic promise of equality and a reality of pervasive differentiation.”In India too, like elsewhere, the issue of suffrage has transmogrified into the larger issue of enfranchisement. For instance, central to the question of adult franchise in India’s liberal democracy have been questions that were central to citizenship, such as ‘Who is an Indian?’ and ‘Where is India?’ - questions the Constituent Assembly Secretariat, a post-independence body that oversaw the preparation of India’s first draft electoral roll based on universal suffrage, had to confront. In How India Became Democratic (2017), academic Ornit Shani notes, in fact, that through narratives and storytelling around universal suffrage, inclusion of one’s name on the voter list was no more a mere procedural happening - .While globally suffrage has pushed to become more universalised, with the restrictions of property, religion or sex being lifted through a global diffusion of democratic ideal, the struggle for suffrage has not truly ended..“They began identifying with it and conveyed a sense that it belonged to them. A place on the roll became their title deed for democracy. Indeed, the subjects of democracy, as Ken Hirschkop suggested, ‘are not just bearers of rights and duties, but also “heroes” of narratives, and their desire for a good life embraces not only material goods … but also a narrative which endows all these features [of a good life] with a symbolic meaning’.” 79 years later, and particularly in the 11 years since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in central governance, where does adult suffrage in India stand, and what are the metrics by which we must assess the health of adult suffrage?What does belongingness in India today look like? How has the deployment of the architecture of procedure, law and justice affected whether the people are able to access these “title deeds of democracy”?These questions might lead us to two uncomfortable truths that truly define the state of suffrage in the republic - the first, that “politically engineered disenfranchisement”, to borrow Talha Abdul Rahman’s phrasing, is evidently happening and through myriad ways. It is continuing to happen through overt forms of manipulation, such as electoral roll revisions like the one in Bihar (what Mr S.N. Sahu, in this issue, establishes as being conflicted with the aspirations of Gandhi and Ambedkar), or potential large-scale voter fraud recently publicised by the leader of opposition (something Vasudev Devadasan argues has exposed our constitutional cracks surrounding the Election Commission). It is also happening through indirect policies such as urban demolitions and home ministry ordained detentions, all of which are ultimately geared towards disenfranchising and excluding from the demos the poor and the most marginalised. As Mr Rahman indeed notes, in this series, demolitions in many of the urban clusters have been succeeded by subsequent removal of names of the slum dwellers from electoral rolls. Akash Bhattacharya’s grounded account, in this series, actually brings to the fore how a catena of administrative decisions and judicial complicity has allowed “unfavourable voters” in the Delhi assembly elections to be simply driven out of the electorate..79 years later, and particularly in the 11 years since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in central governance, where does adult suffrage in India stand, and what are the metrics by which we must assess the health of adult suffrage?.In these ways, the issues confronting suffrage have taken up forms that are more implicit, and in India, on the 79th eve of its Independence, the methods through which this ‘re-engineering’ has happened has become almost sinister. This special issue urges us to re-introduce into our vocabulary of resistance the idea of adult suffrage, a concept accepted to be so normative and fundamental to the idea of India’s liberal democratic making that its preservation for long has been taken to be granted. Perhaps, it is time we look at suffrage in conceptually novel terms altogether.
