Today, we celebrate the adoption of our Constitution—a founding text that transformed a subcontinent of deep inequalities into a democratic republic of free and equal citizens. Ceremonies will be held, speeches delivered, and images of the Preamble circulated with renewed reverence. Yet, amidst this annual ritual of national thanksgiving, one of the Constitution’s most radical promises—universal adult franchise—will rarely be examined with the seriousness it deserves.
This article is an attempt to revisit that promise—not in the abstract, but historically—by returning to the Constituent Assembly and reconstructing how India’s founders imagined the right to vote. What emerges is a fascinating story of how the franchise became the beating heart of India’s democratic order, and also a sobering reminder that the right is today misunderstood in ways that would have startled the framers. For three-quarters of a century, the Supreme Court has treated the franchise as a mere statutory right. That doctrinal decline, however, is a story for another day. On Constitution Day, it is worth returning to the beginning—to the aspiration that animated India’s founding moment, and how the right to vote was designed as a constitutional guarantee even though it was not placed among the fundamental rights.
The Radical Break: Dismantling Colonial Exclusion
Let us start at the very beginning. When the Constitution was born, India did something few nations had dared to attempt: it enfranchised its entire adult population at once, most of whom had never exercised political rights of any kind. Under colonial rule, the right to vote was a privilege rationed by race, property, income, education, and gender. Under the Government of India Act, 1919, barely 3% of Indians could vote.[1] Even the Government of India Act, 1935—the most liberal imperial constitutional instrument—expanded the electorate to only about 20% of adults.[2]
British administrators argued that India was too poor, too illiterate, and too administratively fragile to sustain universal suffrage.[3] The Nehru Report (1928) had rejected that logic, but the Raj resisted. With independence, this calculus changed entirely. When the Constituent Assembly convened in 1946, it became immediately evident that the members were unanimous on at least one question: India must be a full democracy on day one.
Universal adult franchise was not merely a democratic device. It was an act of decolonisation. By giving every adult the vote, the Assembly dismantled (and indeed, inverted) the colonial logic that electoral rights must be rationed in the name of political strategy or administrative convenience.
The Framers Intended the Right to Vote to Be a Constitutional Right
In July 1946, a set of General Directives were prepared at the instance of Jawaharlal Nehru. This document set out the fundamental principles which Nehru hoped would inform the Constitution-drafting effort. Of these, directive 31, which related to franchise, described the right to vote and be elected as an unconditional and absolute right subject only to qualifications based on citizenship, age, and soundness of mind.[4]
This understanding carried into the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee—a sub-set of the Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights and Minorities. Both Ambedkar and Munshi, in their notes submitted to the Sub-Committee, included the right to vote as a fundamental right. Clause 12 of the Sub-Committee’s eventual draft provided that
“Every citizen not below the age of 21 years shall have the right to vote at any election to the Legislature of the Union and of any unit thereof…”[5]
and went on to guarantee “free and secret voting”.[6] BN Rau clarified that its purpose was to ensure that no person who fulfilled the prescribed conditions could be denied the vote.[7] On 14 April 1947, the Sub-Committee adopted the clause, and in its final report, the right to vote appeared squarely as a fundamental right.[8]
When the matter came before the Advisory Committee later that month, Ambedkar pressed the case with characteristic clarity. He insisted that franchise was “the principal thing in the Constitution”[9] and declared adult suffrage to be a fundamental right that could not bear exceptions. Sardar Patel, chairing the Committee, agreed in principle:
“You are entitled to vote. That of course is a fundamental right.”[10]
Other members—including Jagjivan Ram and Hansa Mehta—echoed this view, emphasising that the franchise was a core democratic guarantee that ought not to be left to the whims of future governments.
However, a different anxiety gradually surfaced. C. Rajagopalachari and Govind Ballabh Pant cautioned that entrenching universal adult franchise as a fundamental right would, at that stage, prejudge crucial questions on which the Assembly had not yet reached a settlement: whether the Union legislature would be elected directly or indirectly, how much autonomy provinces would retain, and how princely states—many of which were drafting or contemplating their own constitutional arrangements—would respond to a rigid, centrally imposed suffrage regime.[11]
It is worth recalling that this was in April 1947 – months before partition would tear the nation apart. At the time, the idea of separate constitutions for the Union and the provinces was still very much alive. To hardcode adult franchise in Part III for both levels of government risked predetermining the constitutional structure at a time when its basic contours were unsettled.
The result was a compromise. The Advisory Committee decided not to classify the right to vote as a fundamental right, but it did not retreat from the principle of universal adult suffrage. Instead, it agreed that the guarantee should be entrenched elsewhere in the Constitution, and Ambedkar insisted that the full text of the clause—together with the Committee’s endorsement—be forwarded to the Constituent Assembly.[12] The interim report of 23 April 1947 recorded that the Committee agreed with the proposed provision “in spirit”, but believed that it should find a place outside the fundamental rights chapter.[13]
From that point on, universal adult franchise was treated as a constitutional premise. Both the model Provincial Constitution and the model Union Constitution provided that elections would be based on adult suffrage. In the February 1948 Draft Constitution, provisions to this effect appeared in the chapters on Parliament and on State legislatures. A Special Committee later suggested that it would be better to have a single, overarching article guaranteeing that elections to the House of the People and the State assemblies would rest on adult franchise.[14] Acting on this advice, on 16 June 1949 Ambedkar introduced draft article 289-B, which eventually became Article 326, explicitly mandating that elections to these bodies be held on the basis of universal adult suffrage.[15] The article was adopted without debate—reflecting not neglect, but overwhelming consensus.
Meanwhile, the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS) had already begun acting on the assumption that universal adult franchise was a constitutional guarantee. From March 1948, it undertook the colossal task of preparing the first electoral rolls, even though no electoral statute yet existed. The only legal authority it could invoke was the draft Constitution itself. As Ornit Shani has shown, correspondence relating to the rolls routinely bore the subject line
“under the new constitution,”[16]
revealing the shared understanding that the right to be enrolled flowed directly from the constitutional project, not from any future statute.
Internal notes from the CAS made clear that the draft rolls were to be completed before the Constitution came into force and that the instructions issued in 1948 would later be given statutory backing under the new electoral law. BN Rau’s advice that the work should proceed “in anticipation”[17] of the Constitution and electoral statute rested on the assumption that the qualifications for franchise in the draft Constitution would not be materially altered.
By enrolling voters on this basis, the CAS effectively locked in universal adult franchise. When, ten months later, the Assembly was asked to endorse the preparation of the preliminary rolls, it had little practical option but to give ex post facto approval. As Shani argues, the provisions on universal adult franchise had “become a fact that could not be easily reversed.”[18] The Assembly’s resolution of 8 January 1949 amounted to a backdated imprimatur on what was already, in practice, a constitutional right.
The Drafting Committee then strengthened this guarantee further. On the CAS’s insistence—and in response to reports of provincial attempts to disenfranchise refugees, migrants, and those not seen as “children of the soil”[19]—it recast the electoral scheme. It inserted what is now Article 326, giving explicit expression to universal franchise, and shifted from a model where provincial Election Commissions would run state polls to a single central Election Commission conducting both Union and State elections. As Ambedkar explained:
“Franchise is a most fundamental thing in a democracy. No person who is entitled to be brought into the electoral rolls…should be excluded merely as a result of the prejudice of a local Government, or the whim of an officer.”[20]
Taken together, these developments demonstrate that the framers saw the right to vote as a constitutional right, entrenched through Article 326, operationalised by the electoral statute, and shielded institutionally through a centralised Election Commission.
Why was the Right not made a Fundamental Right?
The puzzle, then, is not why universal adult franchise was protected in the Constitution at all, but why it was not placed in Part III alongside other fundamental rights. There is little evidence in the drafting history or secondary literature. Let me hazard four guesses.
First, the framers were wary of making the right to vote a justiciable fundamental right enforced directly by the Supreme Court. Confronted with early reports of provincial attempts at exclusion and discrimination, the Drafting Committee chose a strategy of administrative centralisation rather than judicialisation: explicitly recognising adult franchise in the Constitution, but entrusting its protection to institutional design rather than to courts. This distrust of expansive judicial enforcement is consistent with the framers’ broader scepticism, reflected in their substitution of “procedure established by law” for “due process of law” in Article 21.[21] In the chapter on elections, the adoption of Article 329 (barring courts from interfering with elections except through specialised election petitions) further insulated electoral processes from writ jurisdiction.
Second, making universal adult franchise a fundamental right risked alienating the princely states. Even after accession, these entities retained the formal right to reject the final Constitution.[22] An unqualified, justiciable right to vote would have pre-empted their own constitutional experiments and been perceived as a direct intrusion into their internal sovereignty. Classifying the franchise as a constitutional—but not fundamental—right was, therefore, a political concession designed to ease their integration into the Union.
Third, the decision reflected a desire to preserve a measure of continuity for the provinces. Under the Government of India Acts, provinces had long controlled their own electoral laws and qualifications.[23] To convert suffrage into a fundamental right in the Union Constitution overnight could have abruptly displaced this autonomy and transformed elections into a field of direct central control.
Finally, having temporarily classified the right as constitutional in April 1947, the practical irreversibility of the preliminary electoral rolls made reopening the classification question politically and administratively unattractive. By mid-1948, the CAS had already instructed provinces and princely states, and the work of enrolling voters on the basis of adult suffrage was well under way. Simultaneously, the same officials were servicing the Assembly and its committees in drafting the Constitution. As the process advanced, it became increasingly difficult to revisit the fundamental/constitutional distinction without affecting the ongoing electoral exercise. The right had been treated as constitutional in practice, and revisiting its location in Part III would have been disruptive and largely symbolic.
In short, the drafting history shows that the right to vote was consciously constitutionalised, but deliberately not fundamentalised. It was elevated beyond the reach of ordinary legislative whim, yet kept outside the thick, court-focused architecture of Part III. The contemporary view of the franchise as a mere statutory right, alterable at will by Parliament, therefore represents a sharp departure from the framers’ design—and from the constitutional status they intended the right to enjoy.
The Forgotten Promise: Judicial Demotion Over 75 Years
This historical narrative stands in stark contrast to what happened after 1950.
Beginning with Ponnuswami (1952)[24] and continuing through Jagan Nath (1954),[25] Jyoti Basu (1982),[26] and Kuldip Nayar (2006),[27] the Supreme Court repeatedly called the right to vote a “purely statutory right”. Ironically, none of these cases actually involved the denial of a citizen’s right to vote. They dealt with the rejection of a candidate’s nomination papers, joinder of parties to an election petition, deletion of names in an election petition, and the removal of the domicile requirement for Rajya Sabha candidates.
In each instance, the Court conflated three separate right: a citizen’s right to vote, a candidate’s right to contest an election, and a litigant’s right to dispute an election. Only the first is constitutionally protected. The latter two are statutory. But the Court blurred these distinctions, and over time, this misreading ossified into a doctrinal mantra: “the right to vote is statutory.”
Curiously, in the meanwhile, rights which derive from the right to vote, such as the right to cast a negative vote (PUCL, 2013[28]) and the right to know a candidate’s criminal antecedents (ADR, 2002[29]) have been elevated to the status of fundamental rights. This is a paradox – parasitic rights enjoy stronger protection than their host right. Clearly, the judicial treatment of the right to vote in India is a complex story—best reserved for another time.
Constitution Day: Remembering What We Have Forgotten
Constitution Day is meant to honour the founding document of the Republic. But it should also be a moment of introspection—a reminder that constitutional promises endure only if we remember why they were made.
The right to vote was not a technical provision tucked away in Part XV. It was the moral centre of the Constitution. It was the device through which a deeply unequal society became a political community of equals. It was the instrument by which the idea of Indian citizenship emerged from the shadows of colonial subjecthood. And it was protected—deliberately, consciously, and carefully—by the framers as a constitutional guarantee.
Seventy-five years later, as our Supreme Court grapples with electoral rolls, disenfranchisement, special revisions, and the independence of electoral institutions, it is worth returning to the founding moment.
The framers believed that if anything must remain inviolable, it is the voter’s place in the Republic. They entrusted this not to Parliament, nor to governments, nor even to courts—but to the Constitution itself. On Constitution Day, the most honest tribute we can offer is to remember that original compact.
*LLM Candidate, University of Cambridge; Former Senior Resident Fellow, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy
[1] Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, Report (1934).
[2] David D. Taylor, Indian Politics and the Elections of 1937 (Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of London, 1971).
[3] Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, Report (1934), ¶¶123-8.
[4] KT Shah, General Directives on the Constitution (July 1946), directive 31.
[5] Draft Report of the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights, clause 12(1) (April 3 1947).
[6] Draft Report of the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights, clause 12(2) (April 3 1947).
[7] B Shiva Rao, ‘The Framing of India’s Constitution: Select Documents’, vol. II.
[8] Report of the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights, clause 12(2).
[9] B Shiva Rao, ‘The Framing of India’s Constitution: Select Documents’, vol. II, p.248 (Proceedings of the Minutes of the Advisory Committee April 21-22 1947).
[10] B Shiva Rao, ‘The Framing of India’s Constitution: Select Documents’, vol. II, p.248 (Proceedings of the Minutes of the Advisory Committee April 21-22 1947).
[11] B Shiva Rao, ‘The Framing of India’s Constitution: Select Documents’, vol. II, p.249 (Proceedings of the Minutes of the Advisory Committee April 21-22 1947).
[12] B Shiva Rao, ‘The Framing of India’s Constitution: Select Documents’, vol. II, p.252 (Proceedings of the Minutes of the Advisory Committee April 21-22 1947).
[13] Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights and Minorities, ‘Interim Report of the Advisory Committee on the Subject of Fundamental Rights’, ¶9 (April 23, 1947).
[14] B Shiva Rao, ‘The Framing of India’s Constitution: Select Documents’, vol. IV, p.252 (Comments and Suggestions on the Draft Constitution, February-October 1948).
[15] Constituent Assembly Debates (vol. 8, 16 June 1949).
[16] Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic, p.162.
[17] Note by BN Rau, 16 March 1948, CA/1/FR/48-1, ECIR; Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic, p.162.
[18] Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic, p.163.
[19] Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic; Letter from the Chair of Cachar District Congress Committee to the Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights, 18 June 1948 CA/1/FR/48-II, ECIR; Letter from the Secretary of the Surma Sammilani, Assam, to CAS, 14 July 1948, CA/12/FR/48; Letter from the Assam Citizens’ Association, Goalpara, to Rajendra Prasad, 2 September 1948, CA/9/FR/48, ECIR.
[20] Constituent Assembly Debates (vol. 8, 15 June 1949).
[21] Rohan Alva, Liberty After Freedom: A History of Article 21, Due Process and the Constitution of India.
[22] Instrument of Accession, ¶ 7.
[23] Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic; Eleanor Newbigin et al, ‘Introduction: Constitutionalism and the Evolution of Democracy in India’, Comparative Studies of South Africa, Africa and the Middle East 26, no 1 (2016) pp.44-65; Arvind Elangovan, ‘Provincial Autonomy, Sir Benegal Narsing Rau, and an Improbable Imagination of Constitutionalism in India, 1935-28’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26, no 1 (2016) pp.66-82.
[24] N.P. Ponnuswami v Returning Officer, Namakkal (1952) 1 SCC 94.
[25] Jagan Nath v Jaswant Singh (1954) 1 SCC 57.
[26] Jyoti Basu & Ors. V Debi Ghoshal & Ors. (1982) 1 SCC 691.
[27] Kuldip Nayar v Union of India (2006) 7 SCC 1.
[28] People’s Union for Civil Liberties v Union of India (2013) 10 SCC 1.
[29] Union of India v Association for Democratic Reforms (2002) 5 SCC 294