TURNING BACK THE CLOCK: THE SPECIAL INTENSIVE REVISION (SIR) THREATENS A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN ADVANCING VOTING RIGHTS
Sagar
BR Ambedkar rose to speak during the second sitting of the First Round Table Conference’s franchise subcommittee, at St James’s Palace in London on 22 December 1930. Comprising 36 members, including Indian politicians, colonial officers and British legislators, the subcommittee was meant to determine who would be allowed to vote under a new constitution for India.
Over a decade had passed since the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, which had introduced direct elections in the colony but restricted voting rights, through property, income, educational and service qualifications, to just three percent of the population. The Depressed Classes, as Dalits were officially known at the time, had almost entirely been denied the vote, as had most women. Ambedkar had hoped this would change soon—until he faced the subcommittee.
“It seems to me that there are only two important questions which this Round Table Conference is going to consider,” he said. “One question is whether India should have responsible government, and the second question is to what people the government should be responsible.” Ambedkar added that he had been “under the impression that the Indian people who came to represent their country at this Round Table Conference were not only united in making a demand for responsible government for India but were also united in the view as to whom that government should be responsible. I am sorry to say, sir, that I have been deluded.”
Most Indian representatives at the conference opposed both universal adult suffrage and the immediate extension of voting rights, arguing that the election machinery was not suitably equipped. The Congress leader MK Gandhi boycotted the conference, but his stance at the second edition, held a year later, reeked of doublespeak. He claimed to be representing all Indian people and said that he supported adult suffrage but argued that the Depressed Classes needed “protection from social and religious persecution” rather than “election to the legislatures.” At another session during the conference, Samuel Hoare, the British secretary of state for India, summarised Gandhi’s position as supporting adult suffrage but favouring indirect elections.
Perhaps it was too much to expect Britain, which had itself adopted universal adult suffrage only in 1928, to do so for a colony whose population was almost six times as large. In a May 1932 report, the Indian Franchise Committee, which the British government had appointed a few weeks after the Second Round Table Conference, acknowledged that adult suffrage was “impracticable at the present time” and recommended that voting rights be gradually extended. The Government of India Act, 1935 extended the franchise for provincial elections to just fourteen percent of the population, with only three percent eligible to vote for the central legislature—up from 0.5 percent under the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms. It did so by diluting the educational qualifications for women and Depressed Classes, from upper-primary schooling to basic literacy, while keeping most other restrictions unchanged.
Ambedkar had failed to convince his compatriots to achieve even the modest target of voting rights for half the population not because his ideas were unimplementable but because he was heavily outnumbered during the deliberations that led to the new colonial constitution. At the Round Table Conferences, the 43 million members of the Depressed Classes had only two representatives: Ambedkar and R Srinivasan. Most other Indian politicians appeared to be content with the existing system, in which they could be voted to the legislatures by an electorate of around 8 million, predominantly made up of propertied upper-caste men. However, through his interventions at the various fora that led to the Government of India Act, Ambedkar mounted a scientific, legalistic and academic resistance to the idea of a limited franchise, arguing that depriving the masses from participating in government formation would lead to an oligarchy that would have a vested interest in perpetuating widespread illiteracy in order to remain in power.
Ambedkar’s arguments have become extremely relevant in the wake of the Election Commission of India’s apparent attempts, through its Special Intensive Revision of the electoral roll in Bihar, to unsettle settled issues over who has the right to vote. By demanding documents that are possessed by a minority of the electorate, the SIR threatens to resurrect the property, income, educational and service qualifications that existed during the colonial era. These 11 documents are ostensibly meant to enable voters to prove their date and place of birth, but, despite the repeated urging of the Supreme Court, the ECI has refused, on specious grounds, to amend its original order and accept Aadhaar cards, which most people have, as sufficient proof. In an attempt to complete the SIR within its unrealistic timeline of one month, however, a large proportion of enrolment forms have been collected with only Aadhaar cards. At the very least, this gives the ECI the discretion to strike off millions of voters simply because they do not possess the documents mentioned in its arbitrary list.
Ambedkar’s arguments have become extremely relevant in the wake of the ECI’s apparent attempts, through the SIR in Bihar, to unsettle settled issues over who has the right to vote.
In February 1928, the Indian Statutory Commission, headed by the Liberal MP John Simon, arrived in India, amid protests by the Indian National Congress, to review the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms. Among other recommendations, the commission proposed that the franchise be made “as broad as possible,” since the existing qualifications gave “a predominance and sometimes a monopoly in the vote to certain classes of population.” In a report submitted to the commission, on 17 May 1929, Ambedkar argued that viewing voting rights as a “favour” was equivalent to accepting that people “have no right but what those in power choose to give them”—a premise that, he wrote, lay at the heart of slavery.
At the First Round Table Conference, Ambedkar equated universal adult suffrage with the right to self-defence. “It means that you will create a legislature which will have the amplest power of passing laws which will affect the life, liberty and property of the people,” he said, adding that “if your legislature is going to have that power of affecting your life in these most vital matters, then surely every individual who is going to be subject to that legislation ought to have the power to defend himself against laws which will probably in the circumstances invade his liberty, invade his life and his property. It is not a mere question of the ballot box. It is not a mere question of polling booths.”
Ambedkar went a step further, explaining to the franchise subcommittee that the vote was not merely a political right. “May I put it in a different way?” he said. “If I understand the franchise, I understand it to be the right to regulate the terms of what one might call associated life in society. That is the essence of the franchise. When you give a man the franchise, what you mean is that you give him power to regulate the terms on which he will live in relationship with other individuals in society.” After establishing this premise, he added that “you cannot give the higher classes—the intellectuals, as they are called, or the propertied classes—the power to regulate the terms of associated life and leave the lower classes at their mercy. They, too, must have the power to regulate the terms of associated life.”
The ECI justified its decision to carry out the SIR in Bihar on the grounds that the Special Summary Revision, an annual exercise last conducted between October and December 2024, had “limitations” in identifying inaccuracies in the electoral rolls that necessitated preparing a fresh roll in the interest of “accuracy, transparency and inclusion.” During my reporting on the SIR, however, I found many people at risk of exclusion because the ECI’s booth-level officers had not reached out to them or been transparent about the process.
Several inaccuracies thrown up by this deeply flawed process have since been revealed. The ECI published a draft electoral roll on 1 August. Barely a fortnight later, Tejashwi Yadav, the leader of the opposition in the state’s legislative assembly, showed that the deputy chief minister Vijay Sinha had been enrolled at two places. The ECI responded by sending Sinha a notice. The following week, the activist Yogendra Yadav presented two people before the Supreme Court who had been declared dead by the ECI. Although the court had explicitly asked petitioners challenging the SIR to present voters who had been wrongfully excluded from the draft roll, promising to halt the exercise if even fifteen such people were produced, the ECI’s counsel Rakesh Dwivedi dismissed Yadav’s actions as a “drama.” The Supreme Court has still not acted in the matter.
Similar arguments about the limitations of the electoral and administrative machinery had been made in opposition to universal adult suffrage during the 1930s. Ambedkar dismissed them as “not insuperable” and unjust to citizens. He told the franchise subcommittee that the state could not make “an inherent right of a people dependent upon the convenience of your administration.” In response to another speaker’s argument that there were not enough officials and polling booths to handle such a surge in voter numbers, he asked “what would be the situation if he were told that he had been wronged by an individual, that he had a good case which, if he brought it to the court, would certainly succeed, but that he could not be given redress because we had not sufficient judges in the high court. How would he like that position?”
By demanding matriculation certificates—one of the few documents in its list that more than a negligible minority of Bihar’s electorate possesses—the ECI has gone far beyond the colonial administration’s requirements on how much education one needed to be eligible to vote. The 1932 report of the Indian Franchise Committee throws light on the contemporary understanding of educational qualifications. “Literacy is by itself no test of wisdom, character, or political ability, and illiteracy by no means implies that the individual is not capable of casting an intelligent vote on matters within the range of his own knowledge and experience,” the report conceded. “The Indian villager, like the peasant all over the world, is a fairly shrewd person.” However, the committee argued that illiteracy limited one’s political knowledge because their sources of information were limited and unverified. “He can read neither books nor newspapers, and is therefore dependent for knowledge of matters concerning his province, or India as a whole, or the outside world, upon what he can learn from the conversation of his neighbours, most of whom in India are also illiterate, supplemented by occasional readings by others from newspapers, and from canvassing and public meetings held by candidates and their agents at times of election.”
As a corrective, the committee recommended universal primary education and the growth of broadcasting services in rural India. While these have been implemented, the Narendra Modi government has used its control over mass media—and, increasingly, education—to skew the collective political consciousness of Indian citizens, by propagating biased and hateful information. Ambedkar anticipated this during his arguments for universal adult suffrage. In his report to the Simon commission, he wrote that “the question cannot be one of literacy or illiteracy: the question can be of intelligence alone.”
By demanding matriculation certificates—one of the few documents in its list that more than a negligible minority possess—the ECI has gone far beyond the colonial administration’s educational qualifications for elections.
Those who insisted on literacy being a prerequisite for voting rights, Ambedkar argued, committed two mistakes. The first was the belief that an illiterate person was necessarily an unintelligent person. “But everyone knows that, to maintain that an illiterate person can be a very intelligent person, is not to utter a paradox,” he wrote. “Indeed, an appeal to experience would fortify the conclusion that illiterate people all over the world including India have intelligence enough to understand and manage their own affairs. At any rate the law presumes that above a certain age [everyone] has intelligence enough to be entrusted with the responsibility of managing his own affairs.” An illiterate person might make a mistake in whom they voted for, “but then the Development Department of Bombay has fallen into mistakes of judgement equally great which though they are condemned, are all the same tolerated.”
The second mistake, according to Ambedkar, was assuming that literacy conferred a higher level of intelligence or political knowledge. “But in these days of ours reading has become substitute for thinking,” he wrote. “The man who reads only the newspaper of his own party and reads its political intelligence in a medley of other stuff, narratives of crimes and descriptions of football matches, need not know that there is more than one side to a question and seldom asks if there is one, nor what is the evidence for what the paper tells him. The printed page, because it seems to represent some unknown power, is believed more readily than what he hears in talk.”
The ECI’s evident bias towards wealthier voters, who are much more likely to have the necessary documents for the SIR, is reminiscent of the colonial authorities’ insistence on retaining a property qualification—which also included wages and the payment of rent or income tax—for voting rights. “Property has from the outset been the main foundation for the franchise,” the Indian Franchise Committee wrote in its 1932 report. “It is a system which is well understood in India, where it has been in force for local bodies for nearly two generations.” Based solely on this customary requirement, a slightly diluted property qualification was retained in the Government of India Act.
In his submissions to the various committees, Ambedkar argued that the concept of private property should not be considered while delineating voting rights. In his report to the Simon commission, he wrote that “the poorer the individual, the greater the necessity of enfranchising him.” In every society based on private property, he added, “the terms of associated life as between owners and workers are from the start set against the workers. If the welfare of the worker is to be guaranteed from being menaced by the owners the terms of their associated life must be constantly resettled. But this can hardly be done unless the franchise is dissociated from property and extended to all propertyless adults.”
On 29 May 1928, Ambedkar had made a formal submission to the commission on behalf of the Bahishkrita Hitakarini Sabha, an organisation he founded to advocate for the Depressed Classes of Bombay. In this statement, he was more pragmatic, seeking only the relaxation, rather than abolition, of property requirements. The BKS, he wrote, would “be content” if the qualification for the provincial legislature was kept at the same level as that for local bodies. “The fear often entertained on the part of the Government that such a lowering of the franchise will bring in a large part of unintelligent people is without foundation,” he argued. “Large property is not incompatible with ignorance. Nor is abject poverty incompatible with high degree of intelligence. Property may as well dull the edge of intelligence. On the other hand poverty does and often must stimulate intelligence.” The government’s insistence on high property qualifications, therefore, was “nothing but a superstition” cultivated by the wealthy in order to deprive the masses of voting rights.
On the strength of these arguments, Ambedkar was able to enshrine universal adult suffrage in the Constitution—making India the first large democracy in the world to do so at its inception, rather than in an incremental manner. Throughout its history, the ECI has sought to protect this right, making strenuous efforts to ensure that every eligible voter, regardless of their circumstances, is enrolled. The SIR marks a reversal of this policy, jeopardising a century of progress to further the electoral interests of the ruling party.
Sagar is a senior staff writer at The Caravan.
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/sir-threatens-century-progress-advancing-voting-rights. Please consider subscribing to and supporting Caravan.
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