When India stepped into freedom in the autumn of 1947, democracy was deemed by many to be a doomed project — nowhere had such an impoverished country managed to even feed its own people and staved off external aggressors. Yet, that anxiety didn’t stop India’s founding fathers and mothers from bestowing unto the country an extraordinary promise of universal adult franchise. The residents of the young nation became voters before they became citizens. Beginning November 1947, bureaucrats in the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS) worked under the guidance of BN Rau to realise the dream of universal suffrage.

It was an audacious experiment. Britain took nearly three centuries to extend the vote to all its adults. The US still didn’t value every citizen as equal. In anticipation of a Constitution that was two years away, a small group of officers pushed the frontiers of democratic imagination in a country wounded by Partition, bruised by colonialism, bleeding poverty, and harbouring 82% illiteracy. In the face of the killing of nearly two million people, the displacement of another 18 million, and the ongoing integration of 552 princely States, India’s still-nascent government machinery succeeded in breathing life into philosophy by building the country’s first voter roll.

As noted by historian Ornit Shani in How India Became Democratic, it was a fraught exercise, but officials and governments showed imagination and flexibility, moving away from colonial prerogatives of keeping the voting pool practical and manageable. Especially on the question of registering refugees and women, officials built an expansive idea of a voter, focussing on inclusion over inadvertent errors.

Governments asked officials going to register voters to inform people in the village or ward about their planned visit days beforehand, and to come at a time people were likely to be home. They discarded previously institutionalised contempt........

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