5 - Democracy and Parliamentarism

Summary

Cannot light penetrate the masses? Light! Let us repeat it again and again – Light and more Light … dispense the alphabet, assert men's right. The crowd can be made sublime.

—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

There comes a grave question: given a mass of ignorance and poverty, is that mass less dangerous without the ballot? The answer to this depends upon whose danger one envisages.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

We are going to clothe them with political power – those who do not have two square meals a day and those who are almost beggars in the streets, and those who remain unemployed for nine months in a year.

—Jadubans Sahay, Constituent Assembly Debates,22 November 1949

Not till the French Third Republic, in the year 1884, would universal male franchise be established in Europe, almost a century (or two in the case of England) after the advent of representative government. It would take until 1907 for the small settler colony of New Zealand to become the first country to have universal adult franchise. Only in the aftermath of the First World War would it become widely accepted in the Western world. It would take well into the 1960s for the various systemic barriers to voting in the United States to be removed and universal franchise to become a reality. The political struggle that developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the banner of democracy was for the expansion of franchise. It was won not by benevolence, but through blood and barricade, and eventually on the ruins of a continent-destroying war. In India, on the other hand, full and unrestricted universal adult franchise was instituted from the very first day the country became independent. In the previous chapter, we focused on the axis of continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial. What concerns us in this chapter is the most significant rupture brought about by the postcolonial transition: democracy. It remains a remarkable fact that the masses of India, a vast majority of whom were poor propertyless peasants, won the right of franchise.2 They would exercise that right only two years after the constitution was completed. The debates about franchise in the assembly were mostly retrospective, well after the issue was settled.