Pankaj assumes India, like Britain and the United States, must have widened the vote in stages…
Pankaj assumes India, like Britain and the United States, must have widened the vote in stages: first landowners, then all men, and women only decades later. Nomita says India did not do it that way. Who is right?
Who do you think is right? Pick one.
The answer: Nomita is right
Why
Pankaj is generalising from a pattern that is real elsewhere: many countries did widen the vote in stages over a century, and women often got it last. But a pattern holding in some places is not a rule that must hold everywhere, and here India is the clear exception. From its very first general election India gave the vote to every adult at once, with no property test, no literacy test, women and men together, at a time when most Indians could not read and some older democracies still did not let women vote at all. The people who wrote the Constitution saw the slow road and chose deliberately not to take it. Test: compare the year women could vote in India with the year they could in Switzerland. Nomita is right: India adopted universal adult franchise in a single step, and assuming it copied the Western timeline gets the history backwards.
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