How we regressed from inclusive to exclusive

Democracy is government by consent, and the citizens express their consent through the vote. This may be a well-known truism that needs no reiteration, but how is that ‘consent’ to be obtained and who all are ‘citizens’ was not at all clear when India became independent in 1947. We became ‘citizens’ of a ‘Sovereign Democratic Republic’ only when the Constitution came into effect on January 26, 1950. But the preparation of the electoral rolls for the first general election started well before the chapter on citizenship was drafted by the Constituent Assembly. Hence, it was critical to know who was to be counted as a ‘citizen’ and who was a ‘refugee’, particularly when Punjab, Delhi, Bengal and Assam were flooded with millions of them. 

This fascinating story is told in a remarkable study on ‘How India Became Democratic’ by Israeli scholar Ornit Shani. She narrates how “Indians became voters before they became citizens – by the time the Constitution came into force in 1950, the notion of universal suffrage and electoral democracy was already grounded.” 

Free India’s founding leaders were determined to create a democratic State against the gravest of odds, such as the Partition of the country that resulted in the killing of one million people and the displacement of 18 million across the borders. Secondly, the new republic had to dismantle and then re-integrate 552 Princely States, and their populations had to be registered as citizens of a unified India. Thirdly, democracy had to be grafted onto a society that had myriad social divisions, extremely unjust and unequal social hierarchy, widespread poverty and illiteracy. 

The national movement was committed to the principle of ‘universal adult franchise’ since the Motilal Nehru Report of 1928. But the overwhelming and complex preparatory work for the elections, particularly the preparation of the draft electoral rolls based on adult franchise began only in September 1947. Before that stupendous administrative task of electoral rolls was handed over in March 1950 to the first Chief Election Commissioner, Sukumar Sen, it was designed and managed by a small, newly-formed body of the State in the making: the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS), under the close guidance of Sir Benegal Narsing Rau, an eminent ICS officer and a jurist from Karnataka – Mangaluru, to be specific. The electoral roll was the plinth upon which Indian democracy was to stand.

Negotiating Citizenship

The design for India’s democracy was still only on paper. It was not inevitable that the paper plan, however bold and imaginative it was, would succeed in practice; amidst the violent upheaval of Partition, at a moment when the basic question ‘Who is an Indian?’ – the basic criterion for being a voter – was undecided and contested. Refugees were on the fault line of ‘who is an Indian’ -- both in the preparation of the electoral roll as well as in the drafting of the chapter on Citizenship. 

The CAS decided in July 1948 and issued instructions to the affected states to register all refugees in the electoral rolls at this stage “on a mere declaration by them of their intention to reside permanently in the town or village concerned, irrespective of their actual period of residence”. The Government of West Bengal wrote to the CAS asking for a definition of ‘who is a refugee?’ and whether the declaration to be made should be oral or in writing. The CAS replied that “a refugee… means any person who has migrated into the Province or State on account of disturbances in his usual place of residence.” Still, the governments of West Bengal and Assam continued to harass the refugees, either by asking them to declare their intent to permanently reside in India on stamp paper, or by fixing their residence period to 180 days. Both these measures were frowned upon by the CAS, which made it clear that there should be no declaration on any stamp paper, nor should there be any questions on the duration of their stay.

In East Punjab, the refugees refused to give any declaration of their intention to permanently reside in their electoral unit, stating that they “were constantly on the move”. Some refugee organisations demanded that they “should be enrolled as voters wherever they are now settled”. Indeed, the problem that the Punjab authorities faced was more due to the constant shifting of camps of refugees for their rehabilitation, rather than by any attempts to disenfranchise them. This was the sharp difference in the policies of the Punjab and Bengal governments.   

As Ornit Shani writes, “in the contestation over the refugees’ place in the electoral rolls, rivalling conceptions in the membership of the nation surfaced. In Assam, for example, ethno-nationalist attitudes manifested particularly towards the non-Assamese ‘floating population’, many of whom were Bengali-speaking Hindus from East Pakistan. Local authorities preferred to delimit it to ‘the children of the soil’. Thus, ethno-nationalism was not necessarily based on religion”. By contrast, in West Bengal “any person who would state that he has a domicile in India was to be straightaway included in the rolls”.

In these struggles, citizen’s organizations fought for and defended their democratic rights and citizenship rights with great passion. They inspected vigilantly their governments’ instructions, compared them with those issued by the CAS and consciously strove to cultivate a “good feeling amongst all citizens”. 

This humane and compassionate vision of democracy that was inclusive of all the people living in one electoral unit called India has now disappeared. Even amidst the violent upheavals of Partition, if ‘We, the People’ fought to preserve our democratic spirit of equality and fraternity, irrespective of caste, creed or religion, how did we come to lose it today in ‘Amrit Kaal’ -- the supposed age of peace and prosperity? 

By constantly attacking the food, dress, prayer, trade and profession, even their marriages, millions of citizens of a particular faith have been alienated, if not fully disenfranchised. Their ‘citizenship’ is contested, and their origins or domicile are questioned on grounds of religion. Names are being deleted from electoral rolls, depriving them of their membership in the nation. Questions as to ‘who is a citizen and who is a refugee’ are back again with a clear intent to unsettle and uproot millions. A nation that so maliciously suspects the domicile of 200 million citizens cannot but have a tense future.

(The writer is a former Cabinet Secretariat official)